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Edmonds My First Cookbook

$25.00 NZD

Edmonds My First Cookbook inspires Kiwi Kids' love of baking and cooking. With an illustrated, step-by-step layout, tamariki will find it super easy to learn to cook classic New Zealand recipes.

Become a champion-pikelet-maker, an expert-afghan-baker or an award-winning-pizza-creator! From breakfast through to dessert and all the meals and snacks in between, this collection of over 90 recipes will be the beginning of a life-long love of baking and cooking.

  • 90 recipes for children
  • 96 pages
  • Spiral bound paperback book
  • Measures approximately 21.2cm x 14.2cm x 1cm


In 1879 Thomas John Edmonds, then 20 years old, stepped off the sailing ship Waitangi at Lyttelton. Thomas was born in London in 1858 and had worked for Allen and sons, one of London’s largest confectionery firms. Thomas and his wife Jane soon opened a small grocery store in Linwood, Christchurch where Thomas learned from his customers of their dissatisfaction with the unreliable baking powder products they were able to purchase at the time. In response to their comments he began making his own baking powder out the back of his shop. His first batch of 200 tins went on sale in 1879.

Thomas spent 3 years perfecting his baking powder but demand for Edmonds Baking Powder was initially low so Edmonds travelled the Canterbury region leaving free samples with almost every household, promising to take it back on his next visit if anyone was unsatisfied. No tins were returned and the householders asked for more. Demand slowly grew until its popularity spread from the housewives of Canterbury to span the whole of New Zealand.

Edmonds Baking Powder went from strength to strength and by 1912 one million tins had been sold. Thomas Edmonds was not only a successful businessman but a pioneer in industrial policies, during the Depression the company was the first to introduce a five day, 40 hour week which enabled redundancies to be avoided.

Today the Edmonds range of products has grown to include not only baking ingredients but flour, cake mixes, pastry, mayonnaises and salad dressings and the Edmonds brand still stands for Kiwi home-style cooking and baking.