CBeebies “I Can Cook” Recipe Page Spread

'I Can Cook'- Toad in the Hole Recipe

Link to original recipe - here

When creating my page spread for a child's recipe book I decided to go for more of a picture book style rather than factual. This is mainly because my background is illustration and I believe that simplified illustrations are more likely to engage a child in comparison to factual text and photographs. The first thing I knew I wanted to include, once I had chosen the recipe of 'Toad in the Hole', was to include an actual illustration of a toad in a hole, as a little joke that I believe children would understand. I then integrated this little image into a bottom page border made of grass. Once I had included this I wanted to ensure there wasn't too much confusion in regards to the origin of the ingredients. This is because it was a main aspect of the brief for this was the fact that children nowadays don't really know where there food comes from, so I wanted to make sure I referenced to this. I did this by including a chicken to show the origin of eggs for the recipe and a tomato plant for the origin of the tomatoes. When it came to including the text into the page spread, I placed the ingredients list into a shopping list format, because I think this would help to encourage children to get involved in buying ingredients at the supermarket. For the method, I titled it clearly and used a bold, clear font to type up the text in, as well as using large numbers to make the order method very clear, so there is no confusion. For the page spread overall I used a limited colour palette that wasn't too bright, because I didn't want to visually over-complicate it. Plus I used the colour purple as the background for the method steps, as it isn't a colour of nature so contrasts with the illustrative background I created, and makes it stand out more. 

  Overall I'm quite pleased with how my recipe page spread turned out, and I think the illustrations really bring it together, as well as being a sort of fun educational tool. If I worked into this further I would probably edit the text used for the method and go for a Serif style, as this is more suited for larger amounts of text. Plus, although I like the visual I created in the title I think it would look better if I developed it further, as in its current state it isn't very clear, because the 'O' and the 'A' look quite similar. Besides that, I think the spread works quite well and if i were to created more spreads for this recipe book, I would probably use the grass border across all the pages, as well as using a similar colour scheme to make sure there is a consistent house style.