Baking up a storm

Anna Cameron at home in the kitchen where she is a bit more than ‘Just a Mum’. Photo: Dan Hutchinson

Sharing a few recipes with friends has turned into a full time job and millions of fans for Taupō woman Anna Cameron.

Anna, aka ‘Just a Mum’ has had 5.1 million views on Facebook, 400,000 on Instagram and 700,000 on TikTok in the last 28 days alone.

Those numbers mean plenty of revenue for the social media giants but the real icing on the cake for Anna is the 544,000 views on her own website justamumnz.com over the same period.

Her huge following has taken about 12 years to build up and her first book is being released in shops on September 2.

“The only reason I started putting anything on a blog was I used to take baking to play groups and music groups and things and people would want the recipe.

“My husband got a job where he was working away and I was bored one night and I thought, you know what, if I put it on this thing I'd heard of called a blog, I could just give them the link.”

The blog needed a name before she could get started.

“So, I thought, ‘oh, just a mum’, because when people say what do you do, at that point I was just a mum.”

She put the recipes up and didn’t think anything more about it.

“Then within about a week I could actually see, oh hang on, people are looking at this and so I need to give it some thought.”

She later set up the website, initially focussing on a range of things like children’s hairstyles and activities, and baking but quickly realised it was the baking people were coming for.

And the receipes that do well are the tried and true favourites.

For example over the last months a savoury mince recipe got 30,000 views, followed by a chocolate self-saucing mug cake, pumpkin soup, chocolate and curried suasages.

She is not formally trained as a cook but has had a lifetime to perfect it but her mother, auntie and grandmother have had a big influence.

“They were all farmers, so I think there's always that element of home baking when you're on a farm and you're away from the shops and so there was always home baking or the tins were full or if you went and visited someone, they had recipes, and I loved writing them down.”

Publishers of her book Allen & Unwin, used some of her granmother’s old hand-written recipes as illustrations throughout the book, which Ann wasn’t aware of until she saw it in print, but which were incredibly touching to see.

The book was tougher to put together than it could have been because she signed the contract in April and then her mum Lynette got very sick.

“Very quickly she became very poorly and was put in Hospice care, so I sat with her and Dad for three weeks and then stayed with him to plan the funeral and all those things, which was lovely.

“But then I came home, mindful that the manuscript was due December 1st, so I really should get on to that … and I don't know if you've had grief in your life, but my brain was gone.”

The book has 35 recipes from her website, and the rest are new ones. 

To get around the emotional time after her mother’s death, she perfected the existing recipes first and by the time she was ready to start on the new ones she was in a better frame of mind.

She loves to take tricky recipes and make them simple for people to achieve, using detailed, step-by-step instructions and the new recipes are very special to her.

Anna will be at Paper Plus in Taupō next week, September 4 at 5.30pm for a book launch.