Hi Folks,

I wanted to take a moment in this week’s Notes for Folks to share a tiny behind-the-scenes story from the Cook’n 16 launch...because it perfectly shows how special this community really is.

For the last 15 years, Cook’n has opened new recipes using our familiar Notepad theme; the one with the spiral binding and the white-and-yellow page look.


Many of you have grown quite fond of it. But with tens of thousands of new MasterCook users joining the Cook’n family, we realized that Notepad felt… well… a little unexpected to newcomers. And after 15 years, even old favorites can start to feel a bit stale.

So, I asked one of our programmers to do a small upgrade in Cook'n 16:

“If a user’s default theme is still Notepad, change it one time to a newer theme.”

Simple request. Easy task. What could possibly go wrong? 😄

As it turns out, one tiny missing condition meant the update accidentally changed the default theme for everyone — even for folks who had already chosen their own favorites like Autumn Sun or Minimal. A few of you spotted it right away and posted in the forum. Thank you! Your quick reports helped us track it down immediately.

The fix is already in place, so anyone who hasn’t updated yet won’t see this issue. And anyone who was affected has already switched their preferred theme back...so all is well.

But here’s where it gets even better…

Originally, I planned to make Paper the new default theme.


It looks beautiful — but after hearing your feedback and taking a closer look, I realized Paper uses a fixed recipe width, which isn’t ideal on large monitors.

So based directly on your input, we made a new decision:

✨ Minimal is now the new default theme for fresh installs.

It’s clean, modern, fully resizable, and feels great whether you’re a longtime Cook’n user or brand-new from MasterCook.


A small hiccup. A quick fix. And a better result because you spoke up.

That’s exactly how I love building Cook’n — together with you. What a great team we make!

Warm regards,
Dan Oaks