What makes a recipe your own?

I used to add cinnamon in my chocolate chip cookies. But I think it’s mostly the frequency of the recipe that gets it named for a person, if you consistently bring the same goodness to family get-to-gethers.

Good question. I don’t know. You cannot patent a recipe. The chef “steal” all the time. I guess it’s like @faye said.

When a man puts himself into it, literally.

http://guanabee.com/2008/11/nom-nom-semen-recipes/

Agreed with @faye. It becomes “Aunt Lucy’s Chocolate Chip Cookies” after years of baking them for family and friends and becoming known for it.

@proXXi That just brings up some bad images in my head because it says fresh semen…

You can, however, copyright a recipe. If your recipe comes from somewhere else originally, you can, at best, say that you adapted it from Maida Heater (or whoever).

It is not your recipe unless you conceive the original dish and come up with the ingredients, their amounts, and the cooking time and method.

I would define a recipe as your own if you can make it without the need to resorting to a recipe book or indeed have drafted and wrote a recipe from many different recipes to create something.

IMHO, it’s when you have tweaked it from the original to make something that you and others like better.

My husband always laughs because I am known far and wide for my “special” brownies and they are made from the recipe that used to be on the back of the Nestle’s semi-sweet mrosels package.