Reviews

iPad Recipe App Reviews

While walking around Belfast at the weekend getting
ingredients for various recipes we are developing at the moment we spotted an
advertisement in the window of Argos for the iPad Mini. Now this has been on
our ‘want list’ for quite a while now, in fact since it was released as it
seemed the perfect size to be a ‘kitchen buddy’ for taking notes, working on
recipe formulae and setting various timers for baking. I don’t think we need to
tell you what happened next, but we now have an iPad Mini living in our
kitchen, it doesn’t always live there don’t worry. It’s a little too convenient
but it was so easy and quick to buy the iPad in Argos compared to other stores
where I know people queue for ages. You can order online or buy the iPad mini
from Argos here.
Initially we weren’t intending to write any sort of review
on it, we just wanted it for our own use in the kitchen, but when we tried to
decide on an app to download to keep recipe notes we were confused to put it
lightly. There are so many to choose from, all promising different features
better than the others and reviews from the users just added to our indecision!
You may think it is a bit petty to worry about 69p or so for an app when you’ve
just paid for an iPad Mini but it was more the hassle of starting to use an app
and then realising it is completely unfit for the purpose you hoped and then having
to transfer all your work to another app. So we decided to take this
opportunity to review two apps which we thought were the best out there at the
moment to try and help anyone else making this same decision.
We decided to review two apps, one with a free version and
one paid app.
The free app we chose was:
Recipes Book
This app is free but you can only add 5 recipes, if you want
to add more then you need to upgrade the app to the full version which costs
£1.49. If you only want to add a few recipes then this is fantastic. There are
some excellent features in this app! To create recipes in the app you manually
enter these, it’s a little time consuming but no more so if you were to write
it all down. The nice thing is you can add your own photos to the recipes and
then the whole recipe and pictures can be backed up to iCloud. So not only are
your recipes safe but you can take them everywhere with you. Another nice
feature is that you can browse all your recipes by their photos in a photo
gallery layout. Overall a nice looking app especially as it offers a free
version. You can view the full details of this app on Apple’s App Store or from
the creators website here.
The paid app we chose was:
The Recipe Box
This app costs £2.49 so is a little pricy when it comes to
apps but when you start looking at what this app offers. The app comes loaded
with a lot of recipes, personally we don’t like this as we just wanted
somewhere to keep our recipe notes, not someone elses, we haven’t found a way
to delete these recipes yet. The main feature this app promotes is recipe
import, which allows you to automatically select and import recipes from loads
of popular websites, even BakingBar! We tried to import a few of our recipes
and the results were brilliant. Simply click on the add recipe button, type a
recipe into the search bar eg “BakingBar Jam and Coconut Sponge” and it will
bring up a google search page. Open the desired link and highlight the title
and select ‘Title’ in the capture bar at the bottom of the screen. You do this
for each the title, ingredients and directions and then select save. This
creates an entry into your recipe book for this recipe. Everything is presented
very elegantly.

 

Another feature we love is that you can export a shopping
list of the ingredients you need for each recipe, now that’s something we know
we will use. There’s tons of features of this app but we cant mention them all
here. But you can view full details of the app on Apple’s App Store or the
creators website here.

bakingbar

BakingBar was launched in 2010 to provide simple and straightforward baking guides and recipes. BakingBar are currently recipe developers for Neills Flour and MyProtein.