Bake Book
A baking app for home bakers, made by a home baker. Log bakes, save recipes, and connect with other bakers.
APP STORE↗WHY I BUILT IT
Home baking is my favorite hobby. I bake most weekends, and I’ll often bake the same thing three or four times, changing one thing each go: a wetter dough, different types of flour, a longer proof. By the fourth attempt I couldn’t remember what I’d done on the second. Instagram is the obvious place to put this, but I found myself only posting when something turns out well. So I wanted a private log: a casual place to keep track of what I baked and what I changed. Saving recipes grew out of the same idea, and reading other people’s logs is where it naturally went next.
WHAT I WOULDN’T COMPROMISE ON
Scrapbook, baking-journal branding was the point. I wanted recording a bake to be fun, and a year of them to feel good to look back on. So I drew most of the icons and illustrations myself, and each page reads like something pasted into a notebook rather than a form you filled in. Above all, it could not look like a vibe-coded app.
A website would have been far quicker but I was adamant it had to be an app. Baking is a hobby, so what makes a journal stick is being nudged and being one tap away — push notifications and a home-screen icon. And I wanted it to grow into a community app, which is a much harder thing to retrofit onto the web.
The reason people abandon recipe apps is the typing. So there are two ways in that aren’t typing: paste a link (e.g. a YouTube video) and it pulls the ingredients and the steps out of the description; or paste a block of text, like something ChatGPT gave you, and it comes back as a proper recipe with the app’s own fields filled in. The recipe saving needed to be as easy as possible.
WHAT WAS HARD
I’d never built an app, so there were certainly some ups and downs. I started in Flutter so I could be cross-platform, and it turned out to be a harder road than learning one platform properly. So I dropped it and went iOS-only.
Someone who primarily bakes sourdough has a very different baking process from someone who makes cakes. A log that tries to serve all home baking is nearly impossible, so while I had a ton of ideas at first, I stuck to the basics.