A Great Way to Memorialize a Treasured Family Recipe

When I was growing up we would often visit my maternal grandparents in a tiny southeastern Idaho town (and I mean tiny – only 53 people now according to the 2000 US Census).

One of the many childhood memories was my grandmother’s applesauce cookies. She would store them in well-used tin that once held a fruit cake and we – me and my 40 first cousins – could help ourselves to a cookie whenever we wanted. I can only imagine how many dozens of applesauce cookies – made with her home-canned applesauce from apples grown on several apple trees in the yard – we ate. She always made these cake-like cookies with chocolate chips and frosted them with chocolate frosting. Yum!

Several years ago for a family reunion I shared this cross-stitch pattern featuring the treasured applesauce cookie recipe. I adapted a pattern from a Vanessa-Ann book of designs (but unfortunately I can’t find the book in order to give it proper credit). One of my cousins made a couple tweaks to the design as well, and this is the result.

I never stitched a final version for myself, but my mom did one for me and changed the original blues to greens to better match my kitchen colors. So now the stitched recipe hangs in my kitchen, making it easy for me to make grandma’s applesauce cookies without having to look up the recipe.

Click the pattern image below if you’d like to download the pattern and perhaps use it as a starting point for your own treasured recipe design.

Enjoy!