Hello everyone!

This week won’t be as heady or heavy as my previous posts have been. “It can’t rain all the time,” after all. Besides that, some version of whatever had Emily laid up for the last week or so has moved on to me. I don’t want to skip another week though, so instead I’m gonna pump myself full of DayQuil, chug broth, step back from the shitshow the world is being, and tell you about a project I’ve been working on and how you can get involved!

Since last year, I’ve been promising you all that I was working on something like a cookbook. A few of my friends have access to it already and it’s still under construction- but it’s always going to be, so I might as well let you all in on it now!

“A cookbook! Are you finally publishing it? Will I be able to buy a copy and have you sign it and hold on to it for a while and then sell it for thousands after you die?!”

In order: Yes, kinda, kinda, no, and umm….. no. Thanks though?

I’m calling it a cookbook because “database” is too impersonal. “From the Bench of the Black Hat Baker” is a living cookbook. Ideally, it will be constantly added to and improved forever. The cookbook is a giant Google document with a linked table of contents. It will contain all of my favorite recipes, and it will be updated every time I find a new one, tweak an old one, or make notes. In essence, I am putting my kitchen notebooks and recipe collection together on the internet for everyone!

“Ok, that’s cool! So how much will it be to gain access?”

Nothing. Accessing the cookbook will be 100% free. All I will ask in return (and in fact will need) is you to subscribe to my blog with your email address. You can do that right now, with that little widget on the right.

That’ll do a couple of things:
1. It will let you know when I post on the blog. This will reduce my dependency on social media for readership and keep me from being beholden to the Almighty and Dreaded Algorithm. I’m not going to send you spam or ads or anything like that.

2. I’ll be able to send you a “share” link to the cookbook!

3. The list stays *mine.* Right now, if Meta or Facebook crashes or decides they don’t like me saying certain things, 90% of my readership goes bye-bye. No way for me to communicate with you, and the only way for you to find out if I published something is literally by visiting the blog daily. With an email list that I can take with me regardless of any new social platforms that crawl out of Tartarus, I can still keep in contact with you and maintain readership.

Okay, I dig that… but what’s gonna be in the cookbook? How do I know you’ll keep it updated?

I came up with this idea so that the cookbook could solve several problems at once for me:

1. Give you guys something good forever in exchange for being my readers. I wanted to give you guys something that will only keep being more valuable as you stay subscribed to me instead of a shitty freebie like a PDF on bread or whatever that stops being useful when you finish reading it.

2. Being a database of recipes for my own use so I don’t rely on apps or little notebooks anymore. I have way too many scraps and notebooks and apps with recipes on them, scratched over with notes and additions. One of my oldest apps for recipes is no longer supported, so it’s literally a matter of time until I lose the ability to use it. I could port the recipes from app to app forever, OR I could just make a searchable Word Doc that I can download if things go south. As long as I have such a document, why not share it?

3. Creating a legacy for people to enjoy in case something happens to me. The last few years have been quite a reminder of how fleeting life is. If anything happens to me, I want my friends and family to have something they can remember me by.

All this means is that I have an interest in keeping the cookbook as filled and up-to-date as possible with all the recipes I personally want to remember. If you look right now, you’ll find a lot of bread recipes and [bracketed notes] for where future recipes will go. Eventually, everyone who gets access to the cookbook will also get the ability to comment to ask questions or help each other!

I promised myself I’d have it ready for people by the end of this year, so I have one month to get it “done”- but it’s never going to be truly finished, so I may as well show it to you now. All you need to do to get access is subscribe to my blog with your email address! No paywalls, no ads. Just my gift to you for making sure I can keep writing for you.

Thanks for reading, remember to subscribe, and
Stay Classy,