This is a question I've been wondering about for a while as a home baker and amateur food scientist. Why do recipes for whipped, fluffy desert components like whipped cream or buttercream icing always seem to call for powdered sugar? If I want to add sugar to a something, why would I also want to add the anti-caking agent (usually starch I think) for powdered sugar as well? Is that starch actually something beneficial for a whipped desert? Because as far as I can tell, the only time powdered sugar makes sense is when it's dusted on top of something or incorporated into a desert that is being mixed by hand and doesn't have the shear of a mixer to dissolve or emulsify the granulated sugar. And I've never had any issues just using regular granulated sugar and honestly prefer it to powdered sugar for icings, whipped cream and the like. If a recipe calls for powdered sugar, but it's being combined with a mixer or beaters I just use regular sugar and the results are great.

Anyone have any thoughts or experience as to what I'm overlooking? Or is it just a hold over from a time when electric mixers weren't common and you needed a finer sugar to incorporate the sugar by hand?

Hey everyone, I've recently made a large batch (90ish) of cookies trying to repurpose brownie mix. It's the Ghirardelli kind if you've seen it before.

On the plus side, the texture's great, it looks like a cookie, and it's chewy like the edge pieces of a brownie. It's very chcolatey, and you can see obvious chunks of chocolate. On the minus side, it's extremely sweet.

Does anyone have ideas on how to use this somewhere else less sweet?

Some ideas I've had so far include crushing the cookies into chunks, and using those chunks to make more cookies (all the ingredients except sugar), like how one would reuse old asphalt do when repaving a road. Another idea is making a cake with these scattered throughout, or using it as a cheesecake crust.

Personally. meringue kisses using a low slow bake recipe are my favorite for parties and gatherings. They are gluten free, they can be made with and without chocolate chips, they look sophisticated as long as they don't crack in transit and I really like them.

Banana bread and zuchini bread are typical snacks around our house. Nothing unique about the recipes, I just like them.

For example, if I want to add ground flax to a brownie mix or oats to muffins? What if I want to add some extra dried blueberries to boxed blueberry muffin mix? The box instructions usually say 1/4 cup of oil and 1 egg, and I'm wondering if I need to double both or either if I want to add some more dry ingredients. Or is there maybe a max level at which I don't need to add extra oil/eggs, like a quarter cup at most of oats?

I know baking is a science and ratios are important, but still it'd be nice to have a way to make storebought convenience mixes a wee bit more filling or healthier. I'm used to substituting applesauce for oil in brownies, but I'm curious what else I could do with a storebought mix.

I'm going to a supper club this Saturday and the theme is pie. Now, I love making me some pie (and subsequently eating it), but I'd like to do something a little different from my normal pie.

What is your favorite (ideally esoteric) pie recipe? I'm making one sweet, one savory. Gimme your best shot!

I need a really good recipe to win a baking competition this upcoming week. It doesn't matter if its hard to make or the ingredients are a little more expensive than usual. Anyone have a top-tier cookie recipe they'd be willing to share?

Are you comfortable following most bread baking recipes? Looking to start making your own recipes, and understand what ingredients do at what levels? If yes, this is what I'm going to try and explain the basics of, and point you in the right direction. If no, still feel free to read and ask me to explain anything I did a poor/insufficient job of.

Baker's Percentages

A baker's percentage is calculated by dividing the weight of the ingredient by the total weight of flour, times 100. You might hear it referred to as baker's math, or as a symbol with b%.

For example, if I had 100 grams of flour and 60 grams of water, that would be:

60/100*100 = 60% water, or in bread recipes that's referred to as the hydration. You might have seen on YouTube things like "90% high hydration sourdough!!".

It's important to note that if I had 90 grams of bread flour and 10 grams of whole wheat, that would be 100 total.

Why is this important? Whilst it's not an exact thing, for most breads you can tell a lot by seeing what the baker's percentage of the recipe is. It's also a great way to share those recipes, it's a ratio, so it's easy to scale up or down a batch. I share recipes like this, and it might look as simple as something like:

Flour - 100%
Hydration - 50%
Salt - 2.50%
Lard - 20%
(The flour tortilla recipe I use)

In my experience, I would say that most breads fall in:

50-70% hydration
1.5-3% salt
~3% oil/fats is the optimum for loaf volume without it being very enriched (added fats and sugars), although it's also common for rustic loaves to be lean (no added fats/sugars)

There's not much I can do in terms of the typical range for other ingredients, apart from recommending resources that help to explain what these ingredients do, and give examples using bakers percentages. Michael Suas' "Advanced bread and pastry" explains what all the commonly used ingredients for each section are used for, and gives lots of recipes for different items in both weights and baker's percentages.

Bakerpedia is a great resource for seeing the typical ranges used for various products, as well as offering example recipes in some cases. It's much more geared towards industrial/commercial baking, including the use of functional ingredients (additives), but I find that kind of stuff interesting too.

If you have a lot of money to spend, Modernist Bread by Francisco Migoya and Nathan Myhrvold is definitely interesting, informative, and the photography/graphics are as helpful as they are beautiful.

The main way I learnt is to convert recipes I liked/used into baker's percentages, and start to change them. You can find various ones online, but one thing that really helped me was creating a spreadsheet calculator.

I'm going to walk through how I first made my calculator, and hopefully that will show how all the maths actually works.

Recipe Template

This is the recipe for a lean dough, so I keep the name in the top left. The "weight per" is how much I want each loaf or roll to weigh. I can change the number of them, and it'll change the total weight in the recipe to match that. I input the bakers percentages under "percentage" and the formulae display the total percentage of the recipe, and the weights of each ingredient. I like to centre align calculated cells, and right align cells that I have to change.

Showing the Formulae

So how does this actually calculate the weights? You can see that the "Total" for percentages sum up all the percentages in the recipe, and for weight is multiplies the weight per by the number of. Why? Like I mentioned above, baker's percentages are like a ratio. If I know I want 100 grams of dough, and I want to figure out how much flour I need, I need to figure out how many grams each percentage is worth and multiply it by the percent of that ingredient.

100 / 168.40 = 0.5938 grams
0.5938 * 100 = 59.38 grams

You can see me doing this in one step for each weight, where I divide the total weight by the total percentage and multiply by the column to the left - the percentage for each ingredient.

You can make one of these for all of your recipes, and then you can change the weights or batch size very easily by just changing a number or two. As you start to experiment, you can keep a "main" template with lots of blank spaces to write what ingredients you want.

This is my own personal calculator, where I've added things like pre-ferment calculators, double hydration, offsets for water loss with evaporation, something that calculates the amount of vital wheat gluten depending on what protein I want, and checks/balances for seeing if all my flours add up to 100. I also have a vlookup table underneath that tells me the nutritional information for the ingredients I'm using. I also use cell colouring as a validation tool. You can see a screenshot of it here

I don't want to share this with the idea of you using mine, there are many things I'd change about it if I decided to start over, but hopefully it shows you the flexibility and customisability of making your own calculator.

One thing that this can't do is tell you how long to knead, how long to proof, how long to cook, what temps, et c. The only thing I can recommend for that is continuing to read and do other written recipes, until you get the intuition - although I still look up recipes similar to what I've written to double check things like cooking time!

In terms of how long to bulk/final proof, generally you'll get a feel for things like judging volume (if i'm not doing an open crumb bread, I like to proof in a large 2L jug to measure change in volume). For final proof I like to use the poke test, although you'd expect a poke test on baguette dough to spring back much more than you would on challah. You want more oven spring with baguette than challah, so understanding what the tests mean and reading through resources that explain those things are very useful.

I hope this has made sense, I'm not very experienced with long-form writing and trying to teach a topic like this, but I'm trying to lean into the tildes mindset.

The month of May brings my birthday and wedding anniversary, so we usually end up making a cake or two. We don't usually do anything fancy. Usually a store-made cake. But this year with the pandemic, we ended up just getting some boxed cakes - Betty Crocker, Duncan Hines. Those sorts of things.

The problem is that they call for eggs and I'm allergic to egg yolks. (Not egg whites, oddly enough - just egg yolks.) So I've found some egg substitute. It works pretty well considering there's no egg in it. But I've found that when I use it in cakes, sometimes they turn out just fine, and other times they end up falling apart.

I know that eggs can be used for flavor, as a rising agent, as a binder, etc. but it's not clear to me how to tell which thing it's being used for in a given recipe. So my question is, in the case of a cake, are there other things I could substitute for egg yolks? The stuff I'm using has potato starch, baking powder, and psyllium husks. I guess the baking powder handles the rising aspect and the psyllium husks are probably like a binder? Are there other things I could be using?