There’s lots of good reason to bake during the lockdown, you can literally list them:

• It’s a great thing to do indoors when it’s raining
• Restaurants are closed so another way to try new things is to make them at home
• You will always need to eat so being confident cooking will be useful for your whole life 
• It’s often cheaper than buying it at the shop (For the banana bread in my first recipe I posted it costs 30p to buy the ingredients while slices of cake in a cafe like Starbucks costs about £2 a time when it’s made for you)
• And it’s really fun! 

I decided I wanted to start a recipe blog to help people to cook and prove the reasons above. I don’t make my own recipes (at the moment) but thought if I shared the recipes I’ve tried, with pictures showing me doing it, other children would know it was easy to do and see what the result was. 

When looking to start the blog the first thing to think about was how I would make it look good on my website and make it easy to do. My site is made using WordPress, which is a software that lots of people use to make it easy to create a website. There are lots of WordPress users and developers that have already created websites for different purposes. If they find a good way of doing something they can share the way they’ve found to do it as a WordPress ‘plugin’. You normally find that if you have an idea someone else will have already done it and you can find a plugin that will help you get started.  

You find the plugins menu down the left-hand side of the WordPress menu bar below. I started by searching for Recipes.

I started by opening eight of them in new tabs to choose the one I would use. I looked at the screenshots and the review ratings of them and slowly closed the ones I felt that wouldn’t work for me. Some of them when you looked at the description in detail you found a lot fo the feature was in the premium version which you had to pay for and we didn’t want to pay. I aimed to get the ones where I could add a few photos as that was the main aim in this. I had a couple left so I had to compare them so that only one survived to live another day…

Both of the final two would’ve been good. The runner up was ‘WP Recipe Maker’. I liked the clean look of the one I ultimately chose a bit better, and I noticed WP Recipe Maker had a screenshot that showed it presented measures branded as ‘US Customary’. It felt like it might be more designed for US based users and we’re UK based. You might not have had to show that section, but given I liked the look of the other plugin a bit more anyway, this helped decide on it.

The one I chose was called ‘Recipe Blocks 2.0’. One of my favourite things about it was that you’re able to tick off the ingredients as you use them. It had all the other things I needed: lots of space to add images; different sections to write ingredients, instructions and other details for making your food; and it was laid out really well. As you looked through the screenshots it was one of the best. It had a video showing how to use it. So this was the one Installed.

So that’s how I got set up to write my first recipe. You can find that recipe – for banana bread – here.