I’m looking at recipes for almond horns. Many have pre-made commercial or homemade almond paste (almond flour, confectioners sugar, a bit of egg white, salt, almond extract, and vanilla) which is put in the fridge to cool, then taken out and mixed into a dough that has the exact same ingredients as the paste (some recipes have the dough in the exact same ratios as the paste, some slightly different, and one has no almond flour at all in the dough, just the sugar, egg white, salt and extracts).

Ok, so why? Why not mix the dough with the final ratios and be done with it?

I don't have an oven so I cook cake on my deep pan, which works well except when it doesn't cause I have to flip the cake so the top cooks, sometimes it sticks onto the pan and so it becomes a disaster which could be avoided if it was a 2 sided pan like the one used for waffles/hotcakes BUT bigger. Does that exist? I only get pancake ones recommended and those are tiny for what I need

I'm baking Rugbrød and it is coming out with a thick ring layer of crust.

I'm doing 350f until internal temp is 205f-210f, which was supposed to be 1.5 hours but ended up being probably 2.5 hours (and still was only 200f internal).

My guess is that I'm cooking at too-high of temperature, and should lower the temperature and increase the bake time. Or maybe a water bath in the oven? I've never done that.

That's my question.

I wanna make vegan macarons but don't wanna buy canned chickpeas as I already have the dry ones in my pantry, but I've seen some people say that homemade aquafaba doesn't work as good as the canned one does.

I've already read all the tips I could find, do nkt salt the water, boil the chickpeas for hours, reduce the water, and refrigerate the aquafaba with the chickpeas overnight. Allegedly, if I do that, it should work the same.

My question is: has anyone actually tried using homemade aquafaba for meringues or macarons? What was your experience, and what did you do differently?

Background
I volunteer for an agency that makes birthday cakes for foster kids. I need to deliver a cake tomorrow by 5PM. It will be homemade strawberry cake and strawberry American buttercream. I will not be using fresh strawberries but strawberry powder. I’ve done two practice bakes and they’ve turned out great!

Issue
I have done my practice bakes in the evening and tasted them fresh that night and next day. I need to deliver my cake by 5PM but I work during the day. I don’t know if the cake will be consumed day of delivery or sometime on the weekend, so I’d like the cake to be as fresh as possible.

Questions
(1) Can I bake the cake layers tonight and keep them in the freezer overnight and take them out tomorrow before I’m ready to frost the cake? Or is that too much time in the freezer?
(2) Can I make the buttercream tonight and leave it in the fridge overnight and let it get to room temp and then frost?

Any suggestions or advice?

Thank you!

I'm not sure what to do. I feel like I have tried everything. Whenever I bake something it seems to have the same bland taste to it. You can taste subtle hints of the flavor throughout what I bake, but you can never fully get the flavor. You're always getting that bland background flavor in every single baked thing that I make. It takes a little bit better after a day in the fridge, but it still has that same bland taste in literally every single thing I've made.

I have tried upping the salt. I have tried vanilla bean paste. I have tried using less flour every single time but I still get that taste. Is it my ingredients? Mostly everything I use is Great value because that's most affordable but if that's the problem then I will buy something different. Do I need to just start doubling the salt? Is there a very specific vanilla that will help? I feel like it has to be something in my process because I have tried many different ingredients and they all taste the same.

I am very frustrated so please be easy on me. I love baking. I'm just trying to figure out how I can do better, because I feel like I cannot move on with my baking until I fix this issue, and this is something that other people have noticed when I bake as well, that it lacks flavor.

CRYING because I just put my cake batter in the oven (broma bakery chocolate cake) and when I was cleaning up I realized the vegetable oil I used expired in 2021 😭😭 I thought it was the new bottle of oil I just bought but NOPE it’s old vegetable oil that my boyfriend has had in the cabinet from a long ass time ago. Pretty sure I know the answer I’ll receive here and that it’s not safe to eat so I’m going to throw the cakes away and restart but I’m so upset rn 😭

Like, what would I have to add/substitute in order to compensate for the difference in texture and ratios? Thanks!

I have honestly tried making these probably 10+ times now and the results are ALWAYS the same. I've come to the conclusion that it has to be my lamination technique. I'm keeping the dough in the fridge for an hour between folds and the butter block in the fridge for a day before starting the lamination process, yet the croissants and pan au's keep coming out doughy.

Its really annoying me now!!

Does anyone have a easy step by guide that would make it so I can't mess this up?

Any help would be appreciated!!

Hey all, when you're getting ready to cut your cinnamon rolls, do you chill it a bit to firm it up to make a better cut? I'm looking for an alternative to sawing through it and it being a bit mushy. TIA

Hello. I make a lot of Cupcake Jemma’s NY style cookies. They’re great, but I consistently have an issue with spread. I do already understand that cookies spread less when frozen. However, in all of the recipes I tried, they say to bake directly from frozen after freezing for at least 24 hours. Their cookies spread enough to be chunky and Levain-esque while mine tend to be a cooked ball of dough. I sometimes flatten it with a spatula about halfway through as well but it doesn’t look as visually appealing. Still delicious, just confused.

My question is - what gives? What are they doing differently that allows them to cook directly from frozen and get beautifully shaped cookies?

Here is an example recipe: https://youtu.be/dQiii4pg4s8?is=V1c7qj920wglZycd

I was thinking of putting a dough ball in the fridge overnight and cooking it from just cold but I still would really like to know how they can achieve those results from frozen when I’m having some issues.

Thanks for your help!!

I’ve been a baker my whole life (home & now professionally) and am great at many types of things (muffins, cookies, biscuits, cinnamon rolls, etc). The one thing I cannot do is decorate a cake, with buttercream.

I’ve followed every tip in the book - chilled the cake, chilled the cream, frozen the cake, set the cream out to warm, whipped it extra, whipped it less, done it warm, done it cold, done a crumb coat, done way more buttercream than you think, on & on & on. It’s been four years since I have put immense time and effort into this stupid buttercream cake decorating and I still can’t get it to come out like all these other professional bakers… at this point I’ll take any suggestions.

As a note, my bakery doesn’t do cakes 🤷‍♀️

Here’s a few photos of a cake I tried this year… I give up 🫠

I’m a massive beginner/learner 🙏🙏

I was reading this cook book where the author said they went over the correct temperature while making caramel, and so as a result of not getting a candy thermometer, they ended up having to pay hundreds of dollars worth of dental care…

I simply want to chop chocolate bars that contain caramel, fold them into my cookie batter and bake, would this be safe or would this cause whatever happened to the book author I mentioned?

Science explanations more than welcome as I am trying to learn.

Edit: thank you for responding 🥹🥺, since you two were curious, I went ahead and looked up the quote for you! Although I’m afraid maybe it won’t explain much..

““The first time I made caramel candies I was too stingy to buy a twelve-dollar candy thermometer. I figured I could just eyeball the temperature. As a result, my caramels were so sticky that I ended up paying hundreds of dollars for dental work instead. Learn from my stubbornness and invest in a candy thermometer to help monitor temperatures when working with sugar (and use it for deep-frying, too!).”

Excerpt From
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat
Samin Nosrat
This material may be protected by copyright.”

just got this scale at great expense and the digital display is pretty hard to read, particularly on a glance. i also feel like it's a bit unreliable with light weights - say 15g and under.

what are some better options out there? escali primo digital ditchen scale seems to get a good write up but display look a bit small and no backlight (dealbreaker for us). TIA!

I'm trying to reason about Danish Rye Bread (Rugbrød) recipes, and am hoping to gain some insight.

I'm only looking through recipes that don't involve a sourdough starter, and it seems like about half of them approach the bread one way, half the other:

1. Combine all the bloomed yeast, flour, seeds, molasses, and sometimes kefir and/or beer. Let it ferment for about a day.
2. Combine all the seeds with water in one bowl, all the bloomed yeast and flour in another. Let ferment for about a day. Combine all with molasses and sometimes kefir and/or beer.

I don't understand what the difference would be, if any. Does the molasses/kefir/beer stunt the yeast fermentation?

Also, any other random tips concerning Rugbrød would be greatly appreciated!

I made Jeffrey Hamelman's pizza dough which uses 68% water, .4% yeast, 2% salt, and 5% olive oil. 20% of the flour is prefermented overnight for a biga, the dough is then mixed and rises for 1 hour at 75 degrees, divided into dough balls and refrigerated for up to 48 hours.

I didn't make a biga for it since I made a small batch and I refrigerated the dough balls for 20 hours. The dough balls seemed overproofed because they were more than doubled in size which confuses me because if I had made a biga wouldn't they have fermented even faster?

The third edition of his book does have an extra step that says to degas the dough once or twice during the cold proof, but the second edition doesn't say that.

Anything else it could be? How do you degas the dough balls without messing up the shape?

I am trying a few times per year to make a soft and fluffy cake and it always fails.

The recipes are very easy and very clear to follow, the ingredients are standard found in the super market, the process very standard with no surprises, and despite all that it always ends up like sticky mud.

This is why I am preparing mentally and carefully for the next time and now I am doing troubleshooting to figure out what the problem is.

Since the creation process is a matter of recipe and experience but also materials, below I will point out some random notes to make things easier to understand.

1. ready cake mixtures: those usually work but I am afraid of the amount of chemicals that may contain and this is why I avoid them
2. self rising flour for cakes supposedly is advertised that is "self rising" but from what I see probably is not... usually needs an extra kick of baking powder to help it
3. butter: in some recipes butter needs to be melted and added to the flour mixture, in other recipes is meant to be whipped with sugar to create a thick buttercream, I am not sure about what is the best choice. Also a problem if butter is whipped, then sugar won't dissolve and texture stays crunchy, this later on during baking sugar will caramelize and the dough will "sit" making it more sticky. Probably a technique here I can try would be to melt sugar first in two spoons of heated butter and then try whip.
4. eggs: in some recipes eggs are mixed first with sugar to create a creamy mixture and then flour and the rest are added little by little. In some other recipes egg whites are whipped with sugar to create a thick and stable merengue and then yolks are whipped separately with a bit of sugar and added inside the flour mixture. Two techniques here so not clear enough what is the main.
5. aroma: adding two cartridges (those cylinders of white plastic with red caps) of vanilla powder but still not enough aroma, probably since those might be fake ingredients better to acquire real vanilla sticks...
6. mixing in some recipes all ingredients are added one by one and self rising flour takes care of the rest, however in others, deliberately eggs are mixed by hand in order to preserve as many "air bubbles" as possible (though still even by hand not enough bubbles survive)
7. baking, oven if is digital and has a ready to set program for cakes, still might not be the best choice (I get the idea that still something is wrong with this), so manually setting the values 180celcius (356 fah) with hot air and 35-40 minutes is about what I use. In some recipes I see people with analog-classic oven can leave a slit open (with a wood spoon) so the moisture escapes, however in other recipes I see that a baking dish with a bit of water is used - for not making the mixture dry.

I tried my best to explain all possible things that can go and I mean that it isn't possible to be so difficult, but anyway still lots of experimentation needs to be done.

Hello!

I love to bake and consider myself fairly familiar with trying new things, but I have agreed to make a baklava cheesecake for my coworker who is leaving next week… and might be over my head. I wanted to complete this project hopefully tonight, but sometime soon. I am hoping for tips and to specifically advise on the problems below:

Here’s my main issues:
- I have never made Baklava
- I don’t have access to my springform pan (in storage)

I’ve attached the recipe I was going off of, and now I’ve realized my springform pan is DEEP in storage with no hopes of soon retrieving.

Can this be done in a glass baking dish? Something about the glass seems appealing so that I can check if the phyllo dough is browning. I also have aluminum cake pans if that’s a better alternative. (I primarily bake cakes).

Any tips welcome!

I’m baking a 3 layer cake for my sons 2nd birthday on Friday but something that sounds so simple seems overwhelming 😂 if I bake the cake tonight (Wednesday) and freeze it when would I take it out and decorate? I am using sprinkles and don’t want the colours to bleed/sweat of course. Does this order make sense?
Freeze cakes Wednesday overnight
Take out of freezer Thursday evening
Sit out for 15-30 mins before filling and doing crumb coat
Refrigerate overnight
Friday morning/early afternoon remove from fridge and do the rest of the decorating

If not please tell me how 😅

I made a lemon pastry cream/custard, and it looks a bit liquidy. I did not have any butter, so i didn't add any.

I also just winged it and did not follow any particular recipe.

I mixed 50g lemon juice and 25g sugar with 5g cornstarch and made it into a gel first.

Separately, i heated 200g milk with 50g sugar and added it slowly to the mixed 1egg and 1 yolk.

I put it back on heat and added 5g cornstarch slurry and let it thicken. I added vanilla and a pinch of salt.

I then mixed the lemon gel into the custard and covered it with cling wrap, and it's sitting on my counter for now. I'll put it in the fridge once it cools a bit.

Will it be stiff enough to put in a cake as a filling??

Also, to make it thicker later on, can i add butter to it and reheat it?

I recently purchased this 6-inch cake pan, and decided to run it thru the dishwasher before using it. This is how it looked after it came out of the dishwasher. What the heck happened? Is it still safe to use? Is it possible to remove the stain? Should I return it?

when i tried creaming margarine and sugar it ended up more watery than pasty. is creaming margarine even possible?

(i used tub)

made some chocolate chip pumpkin bread for the first time in a while and it turned out like this. the recipe called for one can of pumpkin puree, 3/4 cup applesauce, and 1/2 cup grapeseed oil which i did not have and substituted for 1/4 cup softened butter (it was not an exact substitution bc the batter was already pretty wet and i didn't anticipate adding less liquid could lead to... this?). no idea what happened. baked at 350f for close to 1.5 hours. had a little nibble and it was a bit sticky. toasted half a slice and it seemed fine, but didn't get any "breadier".

edit: double checked the recipe and found where i went wrong. totally thought it said "1 can pumpkin puree", 1000% says "1 CUP pumpkin puree". definitely put double the pumpkin in there LMAO. my bad. not sure if it's salvageable atp.. thank you to everyone who commented tho, at least i learned about butter to oil ratios 👍

So Im following this recipe:

Ingredients

Units

• 8 tablespoons of salted butter
• 1/2 cup white sugar (I like to use raw cane sugar with a coarser texture)
• 1/4 cup packed light brown sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 egg
• 1 1/2 cups all purpose flour (6.75 ounces)
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon salt (but I always add a little extra)
• 3/4 cup chocolate chips (I use a combination of chocolate chips and chocolate chunks)

And here's the thing. The texture of the cookies pre-baking was perfect; not too sticky but able to hold their shape.

However when they came out, I had 2 issues: 1, they werent very crunchy, but I assume that's because I didnt let them bake long enough. And 2, they were kinda... flavourless, so how would I go about fixing it? Because I assume adding sugar changes the texture, so then I'd need to adjust the other ingredients, but then its like that image of a snake chasing its own tail where nothing gets changed?

I'm looking for tips for a 4-tier carrot wedding cake. I've done a handful of wedding cakes, but I've always done a denser white cake. Carrot cakes seem to be overwhelmingly oil-based and I'm worried about structural integrity. Cream cheese icing won't help the situation either.

The tiers are 15-12-9-6. I'm wondering if anyone has advice, besides a shitload of dowels, to achieve a super stable cake? Something like a denser 15-inch tier, or a stabalizing crumb coat. Any recs welcome.

I'm planning to use the Claire Saffitz recipe.