“Sally’s baking addiction is MY addiction!!!!!!”
An interview with Sally McKenney, Google’s favorite recipe developer
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.
My personal Sally favorite. —Kate
Back in October, I made my yearly pumpkin spice coffee creamer—and by “my” I of course mean Sally’s. Pretty much any time I go looking for a recipe, Sally’s Baking Addiction already has it. I was scrolling TikTok the other day, and found out this wasn’t an original experience.
“Another day baking every Sally’s Baking Addiction recipe bc she can do no wrong,” Pamella Dutra says in one video. The thousands of comments are even more effusive: “I live by miss Sally,” one writes. “We’re on a first-name basis with Sally in our house,” another jokes. And my favorite: “Sally’s baking addiction is MY addiction!!!!!!”
This was how I learned that there was actually a whole community of Sally-heads, though many of us may not necessarily know it, since we all Google in private. This TikTok, however, revealed a sweet shared truth—and was so significant that Sally herself joined TikTok just to comment on it.
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Now that she’s entered her “TikTok era”—and is about to release her fourth cookbook—I wanted to talk with Sally about not only what it’s been like to learn she’s the icon of so many baking Googlers, but also how she and her blog have managed to weather the past 13 years of internet and social media upheaval. Here we chat about all that and also answer the question the internet is always asking: Why do bloggers put their life stories before their recipes?
First, tell me a little bit about who you are. When did you start the blog?
I don't know if you would call it fate or just a crazy transpiring of events. But I started my website, my little food blog, with no plan or intention whatsoever. I've always loved to be creative in the kitchen with recipes. My mom always baked from scratch and she learned from her mom. And so I was in my mid twenties and I was working in an office job and it was just kind of a normal corporate job, 9 to 5, and there wasn't a lot of creativity in it. I found comfort after my work day baking cookies and cupcakes and bringing them into work for everyone. And I just kind of became known as the baker. And I followed a lot of food blogs and that's where I got a lot of my recipes and I was like, hey, maybe I should have my own website, my own food blog, so when people ask me for the recipe, I can send them the recipe that way instead of emailing a recipe.
And so I started a little food blog. I called it Sally's Baking Addiction. There was literally no thought whatsoever into it. I had no idea what I was doing. I just started publishing recipes that I was making and the only people who would read it were some co-workers and my family and that's about it. I was dating my boyfriend who's now my husband, Kevin, and he was taking a photography class and he started teaching me the things that he was learning on his fancy camera. I started to use my boyfriend's camera and really became fascinated with food photography, and this is all kind of happening when Pinterest was starting. So I started to put my recipes on there and I started to get followers who weren't people I knew, they were strangers who were coming to my website. And I remember I had like 100 page views in one day and it was so exciting to me, and I started to publish recipes more often.
By the end of 2012, a year later, I had one of my recipes go viral. It was these cake batter chocolate chip cookies and I still have the recipe on my site. Readers have loved it, and that pushed me into a new wave of website traffic. Right around that one recipe going viral, I got an email from a cookbook editor and she was interested in talking to me about writing a cookbook. It all kind of happened really fast. My cookbook came out in 2014 and then every single year after that, I have added more and more followers and website traffic and then everything blew up in 2020 when everyone was at home baking, and it has just been this whirlwind of a career that started from just my love of baking.
Do you have an idea of how many recipes you have on the blog now?
I probably have about 1,200 now. Every year I kind of go through and ones that don't really make sense anymore for my website—maybe it's a super old recipe, [so] I'll remove that to make room for more. So I have about 1,200 then I also have three books which have 100 in them. So, that’s about 1,500 recipes.
Oh my gosh. How do you get your ideas?
At the beginning it was harder because I didn't have as much kitchen experience. I'm 13 years into the career now, so I have 13 years of kitchen experience and 11 of those years have been full time in the kitchen. So in the beginning, I would say it was harder and I mostly did lots of cookies and bars and a lot of it was just playing around with different amounts and different flavors and candy flavors. And then lots of recipe fails, and I get a lot of requests from readers. I would say 50% of the recipes you see that are newly published on my website, probably an idea came from a reader. And at this point, I have a lot of base recipes that I can start off of. So if I want to create a new cake flavor, I usually start with my vanilla or my chocolate cake and then I build flavors on that. And then if it's something completely new, it's just a matter of testing, researching, testing. There's a lot of food that goes through my kitchen, and luckily I usually have one or two kitchen assistants with me. Luckily they both live in big neighborhoods so they bring home all of their food.
I'm sure there's a dedicated community that follows your work, but I'd love to chat a little bit about the phenomenon I think many of us are part of, which is I came to know you just over time through Googling a recipe or Googling some vague idea for what I wanted to bake or make, and your blog would always be the first link suggested. Is that something you're aware of and do intentionally?
It's a combination of everything. SEO is a very complicated thing and I don't even fully understand it. It would be really hard for any single person to fully get. But about 75% of my website traffic is people who are Googling a recipe and they're coming to my website. And the way you show up and the algorithms, there's so much that goes into it and it's changing all the time. But I think what plays most is having authority on a subject, having consistency, and having quality content. So I publish consistently on my website. I am a cookbook author. There's things that I do, too, like writing a recipe and making sure I'm including those keywords, like my chocolate chip cookie recipe, for example, making sure I'm thinking about what people would want to know about a chocolate chip cookie recipe. How do you store them? Do I need a mixer? And answering those questions in the text. Google wants to see that.
I'm sure you've seen this joke that always goes around about recipe blogs, like, “I don't need your life story before the recipe.” I'd love it if you could put this to rest here: Why is it so important to have text before the recipe?
I have personal friends who are like, “Why do you write so much?” I would say personally I don't include any life stories because it's boring. The information I include is to help bring people to my website. The recipe isn't at the top because you want people to scroll because that's how I earn money and I can support my business and pay my employees and run my website. Running a website is so costly and I'm publishing my content for free. And so in order to fit in ad placements to earn an income and support my business, I have to have content. You have to find a balance between user experience and earning an income. And my audience is very vocal when there are too many ads. I will absolutely take that to heart.
You said 75% of your visitors come from Google, but I imagine that the remaining 25% is part of a community that you built and cultivated. Who are they?
Very passionate bakers. They're bakers who want to learn and who want to improve their baking skills. I would say a lot of my readers are beginner bakers or intermediate. I have a big age range of an audience, anywhere from teenagers all the way up to grandparents.
SEO is one method, but what are some other ways you've had to adapt over the years, and is joining TikTok part of that?
Everything is always changing and you have to be really flexible and you have to be ready to adapt and switch directions and I would say the only constant has been providing quality content and well tested recipes. That has never changed, the way to get my recipes out there has. The biggest change this year was producing more Reels and that has really helped me gain a lot more followers on Instagram.
I joined TikTok in October after resisting it for so long. I have such limited time and I thought that it would be this really big thing to add to my plate. Now, I do have employees, I have five employees, but I still pretty much manage everything. So I was so nervous to join because I didn't think I would have enough time, but I learned that you really can use the same content that you're putting on Instagram on TikTok. And I decided to join because there's a few imposter accounts who are pretending to be me or using my brand name. But I knew I had to join because my friend's daughter, she's a teenager, she sent me this post that someone made, this wonderful video, this woman was making my sandwich bread and saying how much she loved my website and my recipes. And there were hundreds of comments all saying the same and it was so positive and so heartwarming to read. I mean, I was almost in tears reading how lovely everyone is being, supporting my recipes and my work.
You also have a new book coming out!
I've written three books and all three of those books came out eight plus years ago. So it's been a long time since I've published a book. I'm with a new publisher. I'm so excited. This book has been about three years in the process from the idea to the writing to the photography, which I did myself, and just now we're in the editing phase. There are 101 recipes and it covers all categories of baking. So there's pies and cakes and cupcakes and bread and savory baking and breakfast. I want this book to kind of be like your baking handbook.
And then last question: We're officially in the holiday season. What recipe of yours would you recommend people use to kick off their festive baking?
This is actually a very easy question. So these are my two most popular Christmas cookie recipes right now. I have a marshmallow stuffed hot cocoa cookie. They are a hot cocoa flavored cookie with a marshmallow on top that you kind of melt in the oven and then you top it with melted chocolate. And when you break it open, it's like a hard chocolate shell on top with the marshmallow and the hot cocoa flavored cookie. And then number two are my iced gingerbread oatmeal cookies. So think about those store bought iced oatmeal cookies, this is a gingerbread version that's obviously homemade and fresh, soft baked with a spiced icing that sets on top. Those are my two absolute must-makes.
Sally's banana bread has gotten me through some rough emotional times. I don't make my family banana bread recipe anymore because hers is perfect. Sorry gam gam.