Love, Manuela The Baking APP

Review by eFreeware

Most baking inspiration arrives in fragments. A photo on social media, a saved video that never gets rewatched, a screenshot of a recipe that turns out to be missing half the method. Following a baker you like across several platforms works until you actually stand in the kitchen and need the whole thing in one place, readable from start to finish.

Love, Manuela The Baking APP is an attempt to solve that. It is a baking app from Manuela Kjeilen, a Norwegian baker known online as @passionforbaking, and it gathers her recipes into a single paid app rather than spreading them across posts and videos.

Over ten years of baking, nine published books and her own Swedish TV baking show. The app is the digital version of that body of work, and it is priced and structured differently from most food apps.

A recipe collection you buy once

More than 470 recipes sit at the center of the app, all in English. A recipe starts with a big photo and a brief intro, then gives the method, notes and step-by-step pictures. That last part is the detail I keep coming back to: photos at each stage are often what separates a recipe that works from one that leaves you guessing about texture or color.

The developer describes the app as a growing digital baking book, and the purchase model backs that up. You pay $12.99 once, and the store shows the price in your own currency. There is no subscription. Recipes added later are included at no extra cost, so the collection is meant to keep expanding after you have paid.

What appeals to me about this arrangement is the absence of a monthly commitment. A subscription makes sense for a service that delivers something continuously, but a recipe collection is closer to a book, and paying once for something you can return to for years is a fairer fit. The trade-off is that you commit the full amount up front, before you have browsed a single recipe.

What sits alongside the recipes

Recipes are organized into clear categories, which matters once a collection passes a few hundred entries. The range covers sponge cakes in several variations, ganaches in flavors such as strawberry, latte and banana milkshake, Scandinavian-style cakes, light fillings, cheesecakes, ice creams, sweet dough, frostings, cookies and cupcakes.

Each recipe also has a space where you can write your own notes. That is a small feature with real value over time: adjusting oven temperature, halving a batch, or recording which filling your household preferred. In a printed book that means writing in the margins; here it stays attached to the recipe itself.

The developer is clear that this is not a baking video app. It focuses on written recipes, photos, directions and notes. If you learn best by watching someone work through a method, the format here asks more of you as a reader, but it also means you can follow along at your own pace without pausing and rewinding.

The cost and what it is tied to

The app costs $12.99 as a one-time purchase. The price is converted to your local currency by Google Play, so the figure you see at checkout may differ from the dollar amount depending on where you live.

The purchase stays tied to the store account used to buy it, and that same account can restore it whenever you need. That is worth knowing if you change phones or reinstall the app: the access follows the account rather than the device.

The one requirement the app does state plainly is language. Recipes are written in English only.

What the baking is actually like

Kjeilen's stated priority is taste rather than appearance. The developer says flavor comes first in every recipe, with soft textures, creamy fillings and desserts kept from being too sweet. That last point shapes the whole collection: if you have ever made a cake that looked impressive and tasted like pure sugar, the approach here is the opposite.

The style leans heavily Scandinavian, which shows in the cake choices and the lighter fillings. There is plenty of richness in the ganaches and frostings, but the overall balance is toward cakes you can eat a full slice of rather than ones that overwhelm after two bites.

For a home baker, this reads as a collection for occasions: birthdays, coffee with friends, a weekend project, or a dessert to bring to a family meal. The step-by-step photos are most useful on the more involved cakes, where the difference between a good result and a mediocre one comes down to how a batter or a filling should look at each stage.

How I would approach it

Because the whole library is available immediately after purchase, the sensible first move is to pick one recipe that matches equipment you already own rather than the most impressive cake in the collection. Sponge cakes and simple frostings are a reasonable starting point, and they give you a feel for how the instructions are written before you commit an afternoon to something layered and elaborate.

Use the notes field from the first attempt rather than the fifth. Recording what you changed while it is fresh is far easier than reconstructing it later, and over a year those notes turn the app into something more personal than a downloaded recipe collection.

It also helps to treat the category structure as the main way in. With more than 470 recipes, browsing by type, whether that is cheesecakes, cookies or sweet dough, is quicker than scrolling and hoping something catches your eye.

A baking library for people who read recipes

Love, Manuela has been installed more than 10,000 times and holds a 4.3 average from 299 ratings, with the developer noting more than 75,000 registered users worldwide. Those numbers suggest a settled, well-used app rather than a new release finding its feet; it first appeared in April 2020 and was updated in April 2026.

The case for it rests on three things: the size of the collection, the step-by-step photography, and the one-time price. If you bake regularly and prefer written recipes you can read at your own pace, $12.99 for a library of this size is easy to justify, particularly when new recipes arrive without further payment.

It suits home bakers who already enjoy Kjeilen's style, anyone drawn to Scandinavian cakes and lighter fillings, and people who want a reference they own rather than another subscription. The format asks you to read and follow rather than watch, and the recipes come in English, so it rewards bakers who are comfortable with both.

What's new in version 5.0.0

New version of the app, includes new features and bug fixes.