sOur story
The Louisiana egg nog that needed an app
Every Christmas I make a Louisiana egg nog. It started with the grandmother of an old friend and coworker from the Thibodaux area, and probably with many grandmothers before her. I’ve made it by hand for many years since.
It isn’t difficult, but it is long. For two to three hours the mixer runs while a tablespoon of sugar goes in every 2½ minutes and a shot of whiskey every 8, until 40 spoonfuls and 17 shots are in. Two timers, each one repeating, that never line up.
The timing was always the hard part
Every year I struggled to keep the sugar and the whiskey on time. What I needed was several recurring timers running at once, each ringing on its own beat. The iPhone’s timers aren’t built for that, and none of the timer apps I tried were either.
Designed years ago, built now
We designed a lot of what Mawmaw’s does many years ago, starting with timers that repeat and run side by side. We never had the time or the resources to build it properly.
Then two things changed. iOS grew what a kitchen needs: AlarmKit rings a timer even when the phone is on silent, a Live Activity keeps every timer on the Lock Screen, in the Dynamic Island, in StandBy and on Apple Watch, and Siri moves to the next step when your hands are messy. And AI-assisted development let a small team build all of it, fully native, the way we always meant to.
An homage to native platforms
Mawmaw’s is our homage to native apps: apps written in their platform’s own language, with its own controls, so they feel like part of the phone. On iPhone that’s Swift and SwiftUI throughout, with Liquid Glass, AlarmKit, Live Activities, App Intents and Siri, Control Center, Spotlight, Visual Intelligence and CloudKit. It’s our idea of what Apple has always meant an app to be.
On Android it’s Kotlin and Jetpack Compose, with exact alarms that ring with the screen off, Live Updates and Quick Settings tiles.
Neither one runs in a web view or a cross-platform toolkit, and that’s where fully native development shines: a timer rings on time with the phone on silent or the screen off, every timer stays current on the Lock Screen, and the app moves like the rest of the phone.
For the egg nog, and every other recipe
It runs the sugar and the whiskey on their own beats and shows which comes next. It does the same for any recipe: photograph a card or a cookbook page, or bring a link or some text, and it reads it, asks what’s missing and writes a recipe to cook from, with a timer for everything that takes time. Up to four recipes can cook at once.
For the recipes Mawmaws hand down
In Louisiana, a lot of grandmothers end up being called Mawmaw. The app is named for them, and for every family recipe that’s been handed down: the ones on a card, the ones kept in someone’s head, the ones made the same way every Christmas.
Those recipes belong to the family, so Mawmaw’s keeps them there. There’s no account to create and no subscription. Your recipes stay on your phone and in your own iCloud or Google account, and you share one only when you choose, as a private link that opens in any browser and that you can stop at any time. A small server helps only to read a recipe, answer a question about it and pass a shared one along. It keeps nothing it reads, and it can’t open a recipe you share.
We made the app in Louisiana, for the recipes Mawmaws hand down.
Get Mawmaw’s
Mawmaw’s is your personal, private recipe book, on iPhone and Android.
