We interrupt the recipes to insert a commercial link

Anyone who regularly reads my blog has probably now noticed the new amazon images of the cookbooks with most of the blog posts.  There are several reasons for that - the most obvious one being I joined the Amazon Associates program and they make it ridiculously easy to insert the links and images that'll take you to their site so you can be tempted to buy stuff.  Jeff Bezos is no dummy.  He dangles a certain % of each sale driven by the associate's driving traffic/purchases to amazon back to the associate.  Rest assured anything I earn will go towards baking ingredients so I can keep trying new recipes and blogging about them, lol.

But the main driver is I want to give proper credit to the cookbooks & authors that I get my recipes from.  I'm always careful to cite the recipe source but I think it's actually cool to be able  to show you the recipe book I got something from. I believe in giving people the proper credit for their work.  Most of this baking odyssey is about my trying existing recipes from my plethora of baking books.  I rarely have time to make up my own.  I will tweak and fuss over an existing recipe and try to make it as faithfully as the recipe author intended with my notes on what I thought of it and how I'd change it up to (hopefully) make it better.  But I have to give the nod to the people who spent countless hours (because yes, that's what each recipe entails) to put the recipe together in the first place.  It's the right thing to do. 

The other reason is if some of what I post intrigues you enough to make you want to buy the book yourself, you can with a click of the link.  Or, even if you don't end up buying it from amazon, at least now you know what the book looks like in case you do decide to get it from somewhere.  It's always fun when someone tells me they tried a recipe I blogged about and they liked it so much they bought the original cookbook.  I admit to preferences for certain cookbooks and certain cookbook authors and am not shy about making those preferences known.  As I look back at the old posts and see the same cookbooks popping up, which ones I like seem to be obvious.  Once I move and unpack my 200+ baking books again, I'll have to experiment a bit more with the less-used books.  I'm still technically on a no-more-buying-baking-books moratorium until I use more of the recipe books I already have.  I'm setting myself a goal to make at least one recipe from each of the 200+ baking books I own before I let myself buy another.  My ulterior motive?  My favorite cookbook author, Lisa Yockelson, has a new baking book coming out called Bakingstyle in August 2011.  It's already up on amazon but there's no description of it, just the price and the release date.  I have no idea what the theme is or what kind of recipes will be in it.  I don't care.  I want it.  90% of the recipes I try from her cookbook always turn out.  That's a pretty high success rate.  So the challenge is on because I want this book....