I’ve been working on My Nana’s Kitchen for just over a year and a half now, and there are a lot of lessons I’ve learned from it. These lessons come up in conversation enough that I realized that you might want to know about them too, so here they are:

Lesson 1: Being the sole producer/researcher/photographer/ writer/etc. of a blog is much more difficult than anticipated. I bake all the time, so I figured it would be an easy addition to my life and a great way to honour my Nana’s memory; I was only right about the latter.

Baking is my stress reliever, but a full time job barely allows time for it, let alone all the extra steps that come with making whatever I baked into a blog post (photography, writing, editing, etc.)! Which leads me to my next lesson…

Lesson 2: Photographing food is somehow much more difficult than photographing humans and nature. I can’t explain this one. I know natural light helps, but I don’t get any direct light in my kitchen, not to mention that there is none at all as I usually bake at night, so I’m SOL in that department. Even so, you would think because food doesn’t move and you can put it every which way you want, that it would be easy to photograph, but for some reason it’s not…or maybe it’s just difficult for me.

Lesson 3: You can’t only do sweet recipes – my waistline let me know this one! Having a baking blog was a great idea, my Nana taught me my love of baking so it was a perfect fit…not so much for my jeans though. When it comes to baking, I don’t believe in cutting corners, if you want a healthy baking blog you’re inthe wrong place. Don’t get me wrong, I’m generally conscious of what I eat, but if the recipe says a stick of butter I’m going to put that whole stick in and scrape the wrapper to make sure I’ve gotten everything! So I eventually realized that I needed to branch out. I’ll always be a baker first and a cook second, but I do love to cook, so I’ve posted savoury recipes with the same principles as my sweet ones – simple, easy to replicate, and delicious!

Lesson 4: On the subject of the recipes, I learned that the goal of posting once a week was noble yet unattainable. Having a busy schedule just doesn’t allow for it. So suck it up, realize you’re only letting your goal down (not anybody else!), and make a new goal for every two or so weeks. And, when you miss a bit more than that, buckle down and catch up.

Lesson 5: Also about recipes (surprise, surprise, this is a food blog), I learned that it’s actually difficult to post new ones. You’d think that you’re always excited to try new recipes, and I am, but along the way you find some great ones (like these Amazing Oatmeal Coconut Chocolate Chip Cookies and these Incredible Rocky Road Cookies), or love your go to’s (such as My Famous Chocolate Chip Banana Muffins), that it’s hard to create new content!

This list is definitely a work in progress, so I’ll probably come back to you with some more in the future, but in the meantime I’d love to hear your thoughts and/or lessons from your own blogs!