Best-selling Cookbooks to Inspire Your Own Custom Creation

For many avid home cooks, bakers, foodies, and culinary enthusiasts, publishing a custom cookbook is a dream – one that can come true thanks to Mixbook’s collection of cookbook themes. These customizable templates, available in a wide range of design styles, make it easy to print your recipes, tips, and stories alongside photos of your amazing culinary creations.

To help you brainstorm custom cookbook ideas, it’s helpful to browse popular and best-selling cookbooks. Take inspiration from their concepts, aesthetic styles, and content features, and consider replicating favorite elements for your own book.

We’ve selected some stand-out titles among today’s best-selling cookbooks to inspire your own custom cookbook ideas. Check them out below.

Features that all these bestsellers have in common include a clear concept, distinctive design aesthetic, striking food photography, and personal touches throughout. Wondering how to create a cookbook? Simply replicate those features around your own incredible recipes!

Start Here

“Start Here” by Sohla El-Waylly is a New York Times bestseller and award-winning cookbook written around the concept of “instructions for becoming a better cook.” The book features over 200 recipes, but primarily focuses on teaching key techniques that help readers become better cooks. Its chapters are based upon techniques first, with recipes to follow. If you’re a knowledgeable home cook hoping to share your wisdom, consider a similar concept for your own cookbook.

The design of “Start Here” stands out for its modern, clean lines, primary colors, and blocky shapes. The text elements use a modern sans-serif font and ruled lines for breaks, which is very similar to the typography in our Bold Black and White Cookbook theme. The Colorful Mod Cocktails Recipe Book also has similar design elements to this bestseller.

mostly plants

The best-selling cookbook “mostly plants: 101 Delicious Flexitarian Recipes From the Pollan Family” by acclaimed writer Michael Pollan with Corky, Lori, Dana, and Tracy Pollan might inspire your own family cookbook. There are several elements of this cookbook to consider replicating. First is a collaborative approach with multi-generational family members as contributing authors. If your family includes many excellent cooks, why not give each individual the chance to publish their own recipes and writings?

Second is the Pollan family’s distinctive food philosophy – a commitment to “flexitarian” cooking featuring mostly plants. Perhaps your family has its own philosophy around cooking and eating, which can become the concept for your own family cookbook. We have several themes designed especially for family recipes, including the Family Recipe Cookbook.

Good Lookin’ Cookin’: A Year of Meals

“Good Lookin’ Cookin’: A Year of Meals” by Dolly Parton and Rachel Parton George is a best-selling cookbook built around a 12-months-of-the-year format. It features recipes for special family birthday meals plus multi-course meals for holidays such as Mother’s Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. This is a great concept to copy for your own cookbook, especially if your family has long-standing food traditions around holidays and celebrations.

True to Dolly and her sister’s country roots, their cookbook stars southern classics and has a fun and friendly tone. Its design has funky retro vibes with a rainbow color scheme and playful fonts. Achieve a similar folksy look with our Custom Heritage Cookbook by Martha Stewart and What’s Cookin’ themes.

Nadiya Bakes

Winner of “The Great British Baking Show,” Nadiya Hussain, is the author of “Nadiya Bakes,” a best-selling cookbook filled with recipes for breads, cakes, biscuits, and pies. Avid bakers can take inspiration from her dedication to delicious baked goods. The design of “Nadiya Bakes” is inspiring, too. The book has a modern, sophisticated style with a dusky pink and terracotta color palette and stylish food photography.

Get a similar look for your own cookbook photos by styling finished and in-progress recipes, as well as artsy arrangements of kitchen equipment, against marble countertops, and shooting from above. The book’s compositions feature tidy grid layouts and white photo frames. You can find a similar aesthetic in our Family Recipe Cookbook theme.

UMMA: A Korean Mom’s Kitchen Wisdom

“UMMA: A Korean Mom’s Kitchen Wisdom” by Sarah Ahn and Nam Soon Ahn, a New York Times bestseller, embraces the concept of passing down recipes, techniques, stories, and memories from mother to daughter. It also teaches readers about the elements of Korean meals and flavor profiles, traditional ingredients and suggested substitutions, and ways to customize classic Korean dishes. The Ahn family’s journey from North Korea to South Korea to Southern California is woven throughout the book. Perhaps the key concepts of this best-selling cookbook – mother-daughter relationships and cross-generational, cross-cultural wisdom through the lens of food – resonate with you. If so, consider writing a similar cookbook of your own. You could customize the Family Story Coffee Table Book into a cookbook for this kind of project.

The Bean Book

“The Bean Book” by Steve Sando, founder of the Rancho Gordo heirloom bean company, shows the success of an in–depth dive into a single food or food group. The best-selling book is a guide to 50 bean varieties with recipes and vivid photography. Our Black Look Book offers a similar design, and is a fantastic showcase for striking images.

Consider a similar concept to “The Bean Book” for your own custom cookbook ideas. Are you known for your amazing salads? Do you know a thousand recipes for seafood? Maybe chocolate is the love of your life, or you grow prize-winning tomatoes and make endless amazing meals out of them. Dedicate your cookbook to a favorite ingredient of your own.

Now and Then

“Now and Then” by Tessa Kiros is a cookbook that’s also part memoir and part travel guide, all decorated with beautiful photographic vignettes from the author’s family home in the Tuscan countryside. The images star vintage cookware, homey tables adorned with flowers and rustic meals, personal memorabilia, and travel souvenirs. You can achieve a similar vibe for your own cookbook with our Recipe Book by 1canoe2 theme.

“Now and Then” is divided into chapters based on destinations from Kiros’s globe-trotting life, including South Africa, Greece, Thailand, New Orleans, and Mexico. In addition to recipes, each chapter includes essays and snippets of memories about the influences of those diverse culinary traditions on the author’s home cooking. If travel and food are also intertwined passions for you, why not create a custom cookbook-meets-travel book?

The Big, Fun Kids Cookbook

“The Big, Fun Kids Cookbook” from Food Network Magazine, a New York Times bestseller, aims to make cooking easy and fun for kids. In addition to 150-plus recipes curated with kids in mind, it also features games, food trivia, choose-your-own-adventure recipes, and coloring pages. If your greatest culinary successes are in feeding fussy kids and teaching them some skills, then this is a great concept to copy for your own cookbook.

This bestseller’s design is super kid-friendly as well, with bold patterns and colors, fun fonts, bubble frames for tips, and cartoon-like stickers. We have similar fonts, stickers, and background designs available in the Mixbook Studio™. Or, make your own custom cookbook especially for children using the bright and cheerful Recipe Book by Ampersand Design Studio theme.

Want to Know How to Create a Cookbook?

It’s easier than you might think! Once your recipes, photographs, and any other writings you want to include are ready (not a small task, we’ll admit), head to Mixbook to find a photo book theme that matches your vision.

Then, check out our comprehensive, step-by-step guide to making a custom recipe book.

Bon appetit!