Q. Since you are an only child, what point of reference did you use to develop Hannah as the eldest sister of a couple of siblings?
A. I was really lucky, Jenny. I grew up in small town Minnesota where large families were the norm. Most of my friends had brothers and sisters, and we were always popping in unannounced at a friend's house. We weren't at all formal and our mothers knew that if we weren't at Mary Ann's house, we were probably at Marilyn's, or Dorothy's, or Donna's. Since nearly the whole town (population 217) was fairly close to what people now call an extended family, it seemed as if I had multiple brothers and sisters.
Q. How long does it take you to write one of the Hannah books?
A. The outline takes me at least a month, sometimes two---it's very detailed. Then there are another three months or so spent on actually writing the book. In addition to the writing, all the recipes have to be tested and retested and this is where Karen's question about the origin of the recipes comes in. I already mentioned that I have thousands of recipes from my grandmother, my mother, and my aunts. I also have lots of recipes from my husband's side of the family. In all those recipes, I was unable to find one that I thought was perfect for blueberry muffins. I'm not fond of the ones that taste like plain vanilla muffins unless you just happen to bite into a blueberry. My goal was a muffin that taste like blueberries all the way through. Since there was no existing recipe that would work for my perfect muffin, I had to create one. This took about two months and I went through over three-dozen attempts before I arrived at the recipe that's in the book. My husband was valiant and he tasted one from each batch. Maybe it was my imagination, but by the time we agreed it couldn't get any better, he was starting to turn a little blue.
Q. How much did you have to research to make the cookie shop come across as authentic?
A. I didn't have much research to do. I love to bake and I have baked multiple batches of cookies in my home kitchen, especially at Christmas when I make up huge cookie trays for parties. I did go down to my local bakery and take a tour of the kitchen because I needed to familiarize myself with the ovens. When I started the Hannah series, I took the precaution of mentioning that Hannah preferred to mix her cookies in small batches because she thought they tasted better. I agree with her, I do think they taste better, but I'll admit I had an ulterior motive. Most of my cookie recipes yield approximately six to seven dozen cookies and I wanted to give little tips about method while Hannah was mixing and baking them in the book. The method would be different if she were mixing batches that would yield thirty or forty dozen cookies and there's no way she could mix batches that large by hand.
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