Emma Samson of Auburn is an 11-year-old cook who is gearing up for Christmas with her recipes for sweets.

“Mostly, I like to make desserts,” says the young chef, who is in the sixth grade at Fairview Elementary School. She recalls that at Thanksgiving, a time of traditional family cooking in the Samson house, she and her cousins were chopping cranberries and making butter for Emma’s favorite cranberry bread.

With Christmas coming up, Emma is looking forward to making cream cheese cookies and white chocolate party mix. “I like to share my food,” says Emma. “My grandparents get a lot of it. My grandfather just knows when to come over.”

Emma has her own set of measuring cups, but her favorite cooking tool is a “spoonula,” half spoon-half spatula. Though she watches the Food Network and the show “The Next Food Network Star,” Emma’s inspiration for cooking mostly comes from holiday events with her family and settling down with one of her eight cookbooks to look for recipes she wants to make.

“When I’m bored, I like to read cookbooks.”

Emma’s mother Kris confirms her daughter’s love for reading about cooking, “You should see her reading log. It includes a lot of cookbooks.” Often she receives them as gifts from her grandmother Lee Hearn.

Emma gets creative from time to time and enjoys altering recipes to suit the ingredients she has on hand. Last year when she had to do a Pioneer project for her fifth-grade class, Emma looked on the Internet for a recipe from the Pioneer days. She found one for molasses taffy and decided to add her grandfather’s homemade maple syrup. “It was really good,” said Emma.

Emma has had a few disasters, too, she admits. Once in a while she says she adds the wrong thing or too much of something else. One particular time she made a drink using whipped cream, Jell-O and diet cola and she and her family agreed it was pretty awful. But her successes seem to outweigh any mistakes she has made.

She has maintained a relationship with one of her cooking idols, her third-grade teacher, Mrs. Leslie Parker. They would often swap recipes. And one particularly memorable one was for April Fools Day Chicken Not Pie. It seems as if the pie was created with crust, pudding, and candy made to look like the vegetables in a typical chicken potpie. Emma had offered to make dinner for her grandparents the night of April 1. She made Chicken Not Pies for them. As it turned out, her grandmother, when sampling the pie, tried to continue eating the whole pie, not wanting to be rude, and only learned of the ruse when Emma started laughing and saying, “April Fool!”

Emma’s cooking talents include presentation. She loves to serve the food in nice containers and make it look pretty. She also enjoys trying to guess the spices used in restaurant food. Her commitment to the whole process includes the most important part, according to her mother, and that is “The cleaning up!”

“Except,” Emma adds, “when there are a lot of dishes and a complicated recipe. Then I get some help.”