A little about me ...
Hi. My name is Zeina Haddad, a Lebanese-Israeli golden girl who loves to bake and make cakes, and yes, occasionally to cook also (because sadly, we can't live on cake alone!).
I created this website as a place where all my English published cookbooks can be found in one place.
Follow me on Facebook for more articles and recipes that may not have been included in my books.
Thank you for stopping by 🙂
My adventure in writing cookbooks began all the way back in 2001, when my mama wrote down many recipes of hers. My mama, a wonderful and highly experienced cook, wrote down the recipes in Arabic and I took it upon myself, with her encouragement, to translate them in the hopes of publishing them in a book.
I started working on them, but, well, let's just say "life happened", and I had to lay the project aside for a while. I tried picking it up some years later, but unfortunately I did not have the time and the project had to be put on hold again.
Over the years, I completely abandoned the idea, and my mama's hand-written recipes laid forgotten in a dark closet for many long years ... until one day I remembered them, and had the crazy idea to self-publish, after self-publishing became possible.
But my love for a challenge didn't stop there, I decided to do EVERYTHING by myself !! 💥
[Had I known the amount of work that would be involved, especially with my perfectionism, I probably would have made a different decision.🤔]
Mama's recipes. Copyright @2025 Zeina Haddad
Things I like to bake. Copyright @2025 Zeina Haddad
The work involved translating, proofing, proofing, and more proofing 🙄 ... making the recipes to test them (mama actually made a big part of them herself 😉) ... setting up backgrounds to take photos ... learning how to make a professional index (you know, not the one automatically generated in Word; the complex one) - and all this turned out to be the easy part!
Because then I needed to design the books layout, and once that was done, the mess began 😑.
I travailed over the books and finished them, using unsuitable softwares, which compelled me to learn how to work with Photoshop and Indesign (at my age, this part took forever!) and do everything all over again ...
... all the while, losing many of my images files 😥, and having to remake the dishes to take new photos.
This was overwhelming, but with faith in my God, the King of kings and Lord of lords (whom I adore 🧡), I got through it (yay!).
(Oh, and I learned to design and build a website, and praise God, I even designed my own logo. 🥳 🎈🎈)