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Bakers of Tildes, what do you like to bake, and for what type of occasion?
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.
I just recommended zucchini bread to someone as a use for their zucchini harvest!
Things I like to bake:
Chocolate chip or cinnamon raisin scones because they’re tasty, easy, and everyone loves them. Notes: I never bother coating the tops with sugar. The raisin sub right in for the chocolate chips and you just add the cinnamon, you don’t have to adjust the heavy cream.
Sausage rolls because it’s the one thing my dad actually requests. Notes: I just use regular sausage, but still add the extra seasoning. I do recommend letting them chill in the fridge for at least an hour before baking (it makes them less greasy).
Lemon baking soda cookies. They’re soooo good sometimes they don’t even make it into the oven. Perfect summer cookie imo.
French bread because I love the way it makes the kitchen smell.
It would be great if you can easily link recipes...
Done. Wasn’t a problem, I got them all from Pinterest anyway.
Can you share your recipes, too? I'm intrigued by the merengue
https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/meringue-kisses-recipe. I actually learned this recipe from the betty crocker cookie book I think, but this is practically the same recipe. Feel free to double or triple depending on how many cookies you want and to add chocolate chips to the meringue before baking if that appeals to you.
Thanks, I can't wait to try it!
I love meringues!
Gonna try the lemon cookies but surely the 2tsp of cornstarch with 2 cups of flour can't make a perceptible difference?
I’m not sure. The blog post attached to the recipe says the cornstarch makes the cookies soft and chewy. It wasn’t an issue for me because I keep cornstarch on hand.
I love to make savory pastries - pastelitos, quiches, mushroom strudel, spanakopita, empanadas, gougéres… let me know if you’ve got favorite savories.
I kinda lost my taste for sweets after years of pastry cooking, but I’ll still pull out a couple of party tricks for events - cupcakes, baklava, babka, miniatures (eclairs, tartlets, dipped strawberries).
Oh, also, anyone interested in a 150 year old (at least - I'm told it was my great-great-grandmother's) challah recipe? I've been meaning to type that up.
Wow! Color me impressed. I'm going to have to up my game.
I've never made a challah - I would be interested in that recipe!
Yes please on the challah!!
I bake any and all kinds of breads and pastries. For special occasions, I like to pick someone else's culture at work and make breads for them. One year I made cozonac for a Romanian co-worker and her mum for Christmas. Most things I bake outside meal-involved breads are just random experiments and recipe ideas.
Otherwise, I like to bake and freeze sliced sandwich bread, rolls, blocks of shortcrust and blitz puff pastry ready to be rolled out, dumpling wrappers, pizza pinwheels. I also regularly make flatbreads to go with meals, usually I can go back and forth between those and the main meal and use resting/cooking time to do more things.
With the pastries I like to make different hand pies, pasties, desserts, which all freeze and reheat well too :) It's a little more involved but I find the work soothing and a lot of it ends up a lot nicer, and a lot cheaper.
I'm impressed. We make basic sourdough table bread for everyday meals, buy you are taking it to another level.
The pastelito dough mentioned above is a relatively quick laminated dough (pretty much a blitz puff pastry) that handles and freezes well. It’s versatile with empanada fillings and in other cuisines’ recipes that call for rich pastry wrapping.
That's definitely an interesting recipe! It's closer to proper puff pastry than what I do for blitz/rough puff. This is my ingredient list.
All the dry ingredients get mixed together, the wet ingredients get mixed together, and the butter I cube into ~4cm cubes.
I put the wet mix in the fridge and the butter in the freezer until it's firm but not solid.
I toss the butter cubes in the dry mix to stop them sticking, and one by one I use the palm of my hand to crush them flat into discs and put them back in the dry mix. A bench scraper is good to use to unstick it from the counter if it's a little warm, or you get any sticking.
I stir in the fridge cold wet mix until it's just formed a dough, and I form it into a rough square and rest covered in the fridge for half an hour.
Then I do 5 single folds, with 20 minute rests after the first two and then again after the second two.
Then I roll it long out to make nice sized blocks that have 4 portions worth of pasties/hand pies that I can defrost.
I'm usually bad about documenting my steps with photos but this is one of the few things I've taken photos of during most steps. Here are all the progress pics, and some pasties I made. A simple cheese and bean filling as a test for the pastry, and the second pic is is a mushroom bechamel with caramelised onions, tarragon, and wilted spinach. Cooked at 175c in a gas oven for 50 minutes.
I think your documentation is great, and I'm going to have to try this. Interesting adds with the cornstarch, barley malt syrup, and vinegar. Any particular food science behind these components?
I think the vinegar and lemon juice are doing similar things in both of our recipes, helping to stop oxidation while the dough is being prepared. Especially for dough that you don't plan to use right away, you can sometimes notice it going a kind of gray colour?
Barley malt syrup is just for browning, you can use a similar simple sugar or syrup, and even in savoury dishes it can be nice to have a touch of sweetness.
Cornstarch at the % I use is similar to replacing 25% of the regular flour with pastry flour. I just don't keep pastry flour on hand, so cornstarch just adjusts the protein % down a little. Kind of like an anti-vital wheat gluten.
I appreciate the compliments! This kind of rough puff is definitely a lot better with fillings that aren't quite as wet. The bean sauce was a typical British, thickened tomato sauce. And the cheese helped it stop being too wet. The béchamel was quite thick, and lots of fillings to help bulk out the water.
Sure, the acidity makes sense, though I think I prefer lemon juice (citric acid) to vinegar (acetic acid) for a more mellow and less noticable acid component in baking. And the starch substitution for a pastry flour equivalent makes sense as well.
U.S. consumer "all-purpose" flour is relatively low gluten since it's mainly used for baking soda or powder-leavened products. I find it works fine for pie and pastry dough on a household small-batch scale with hand mixing, but there's no substitute for bread flour if you need serious gluten development.
But I'm not sure you need the barley malt sugars for browning, especially with anything that gets an egg wash like the pastelitos.
I find at the levels of vinegar or lemon juice used, there isn't any noticeable taste, but I definitely get where you're coming from.
I definitely agree with you there, I usually keep plain flour and bread flour on hand, or sometime's i'll do a blend of regular bread flour and very strong bread flour or VWG. I generally prefer a pretty weak flour for most kinds of pastries, but you can't beat a high gluten flour for nice rustic breads. Flour in Wales tends to be a little weaker across the board than American flour (although it can be hard to compare due to the ways that protein % are measured different in different countries, especially due to the moisture basis of the flour).
And yeah, I find a little bit of sugar helps me get a more even browning, but it brings something nice to the flavour too. You could definitely do without it, but it's a nice safety blanket and I think it adds enough to add it.
After reading some of the comments you appear to feel a little "one-upped" by most of these peeps..
So I'll relieve you! I just started baking this week, honestly. I made some chocolate croissants, and they turned out pretty well. Some improvements could've been made to increase the lamination of the bread, but it was still solid.
What occasions? Well, just to make my girlfriend happy to be honest LOL. So I'm going to get ideas from her, and build a little recipe document. Depending on how fat we feel, my baking rate might change.
I love baking bread! I used to bake a few loaves (boules, big ol' hearth-style hunks of dough) for social events. I'm slowly getting back into it; I've baked bagels for four weeks in a row now and show no sign of stopping!
I bake novelties. I live in an area where I can easily buy any sort of baked good I could imagine to many things I couldn't. So I mostly bake when I see a video online of something really novel or to use up ingredients I already have around and need eating. The last two things I baked were Tasting History's pumpkin pie (like an apple pie, but with sliced pumpkin, very odd), and baked apples with butter and cinnamon because I overbought on fruit and they'd gone too soft for me to enjoy raw. I never want to bake, but it happens sometimes regardless.
Oh a sliced pumpkin pie, that is very interesting! I also bake sometimes for novelty or out of curiosity. I'm intrigued to try it too, how did yours turn out?
Poorly, because I tried to cook the pumpkin in batches that were slightly too large. The recipe has you par-cook the pumpkin slices because the baking won't cook them before the crust burns, and I was left with slightly crunchy pumpkin slices. Respect the recipe. :D
Always something different, I almost never make anything twice.
Recently made some macaroni bechemel, and pork belly (lol does this even count?).
I'm thinking of making some sort of cookie soon, but I'll need to source chocolate chips, while keeping in mind the amount of sugar cookies contain. Sigh, problems.
I stumbled upon chocolate zucchini bread after growing some in the garden for some reason (I have not eaten zucchini many times before then). It's incredible!
Generally, bread and biscuits are the only things I bake with any regularity. Lately I've been experimenting with something most weekends. I've got a 5 year old that's interested in helping and that has turned into a fun routine.
We've been trying out some gluten-free cooking recently to share with a celiac friend. I've settled on pretty great GF muffins and cupcakes. Currently trying to perfect Brazilian cheese balls.
I found a gluten free bread recipe that actually makes decent bread! With the exception of a ok-warm-but-disappointing-cold bagel recipe I’ve been working on for a year or so, every previous attempt I made for the last ten years has turned out to be a bread brick, and the new recipe makes much better bagels than mine.
Mostly bread! I really like the taste of homemade bread. Usually a sourdough with at least a third whole wheat (or rye or spelt) flour
Thanks all! This is inspiring, as I've rarely baked anything; some of the ideas here are making my mouth water so I need to rediscover our oven.
I love to make challah. It's always been my favorite bread and I'll make it for any occasion. My favorite recipe is from a redditor. It yields such a large bread that if your oven is on the smaller size like mine, you may wish to divide it into two loaves for consistency in baking thru.
This lemon blueberry layer cake is so outrageously good that I have a hard time motivating to bake any other kind. Fresh blueberries work much better than frozen.
Focaccia, all the time. I just love it so much. Nice freshly baked with some fresh garlic spreads or cottage cheese - feta cream. Also nice as filled up sandwich.
I went through a phase where I baked something new every week for like a year - ranging from cookies to pastries to cakes. But then I burned out a bit and haven’t since other than the occasional cookie dough. I will make a big batch, then freeze it and bake a few cookies at a time in the toaster oven.
I'm definitely a very beginner baker. I really love baking anything sweet. Chocolate cupcakes, banana bread, and baked oatmeal are the most common things I've made.
I also love the baking mixes from Trader Joes. Not really 'homemade' but still delicious 😋. Their mochi cake, blood orange cake, and myer lemon cake are our favorites.
I'll bake for any reason. It really is tied to my mood and energy levels. If I know I don't have the energy to clean up after, then I just won't bake anything.
I baked a rainbow layer cake for my daughter's birthday this year. I was terrified, as it was by far the most advanced thing I'd attempted to bake. It came out pretty good and I was proud of it. Most importantly my daughter was thrilled by it. Baking a birthday cake is something I want to do for my kids every year.
During the lockdown I started making corn bread once a week, usually on weekends. Easy to make, you can adjust the sweetness up and down as you feel like, and it's filling. No special occasion, though I have made some specifically for family gatherings since.
My two dessert go-tos are chocolate soufflé and limoncello mascarpone cheesecake. The soufflés only take me about 30 minutes and I love feeling fancy when eating them. The cheesecake is what I usually supply for potlucks and family gatherings.
Scones, banana bread, cakes. Don't really like to eat any baking, but they're great things to bring to your friends!
Muffins, Banana bread, Zucchini Bread, Apple Cinnamon Bread, pretzel rolls, other breads, etc.
Sometimes I make pizza.
I like bread.
There is no occasion other than I tend to be stressed and overwhelmed when I cook.
Is it an easy pretzel roll recipe? I’ve never really made pretzels before but love them. Would you mind sharing you pretzel roll recipe?
You just use pizza dough to make balls of dough, boil each of them in water with baking soda for about 30 seconds, and then coat them with an egg wash and bake until brown.
Thanks!
I prefer to bake the easy stuff, and for me nothing is easier than:
A few years back I realized I could bake pies whenever I wanted, so I bought the biggest pumpkin I could find and made a batch of 16 pumpkin pies! Since then I've diversified with apple, blueberry, sugar and lemon pies.
Other than that I do love making cakes. I have a great carrot cake recipe that's super easy to make.
I've recently started my hand at pizzas, and while they're decent there is still room for improvement.
I have a fail proof pizza dough recipe, if you’re interested. And an awesome German Chocolate Cake Recipe.
I’m very interested in your carrot cake recipe, if you have a link.
I'm so sorry it took me so long to see your response!
I am very interested in both recipes!
Here's mine:
2½ cups flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
2 tsp cinnamon
½ tsp salt
1 cup oil
2 cups sugar
4 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
3 cups grated carrots
Mix dry (flour, b. powder, b. soda, cinnamon, salt)
Mix liquids (oil, sugar, eggs, vanilla)
Add liquids to dry and then add the carrots.
Bake 50 min at 350.
I use a fluted tube cake pan for maximum frosting.
Frosting:
Beat ½ cup of butter with 250g cream cheese.
Incorporate 2½ cups powdered sugar and 1 tsp vanilla.
Wait for cake to cool before frosting.
I'm a fairly new baker (started late last holiday season - maybe mid-November?) but I've taken a strong liking to it. I do a lot of crust baking: tart doughs, quiche doughs, pizza doughs, pie doughs, bread (for sandwiches or for bread bowls)...and cake, which is a bit of an outlier.
Since this popped up on the front page, let's revive this topic I guess!
Lately I've been making all kinds of basic cakes, i.e. pound cake, lemon cake, Romanian "chec", etc. It's the perfect snack for me, works amazing with coffee.
I also did some brownies recently, once with a chocolate glaze and once with cocoa syrup. They were both good, but maybe brownies aren't for me.
I want to make some Butterstollen for Christmas - ate some in Germany this month, and I really loved it. It has so much stuff in it, and tasted very rich, I have to try making it.
Sure, why not?
I've already written about my recent foray into bread, and I've been doing a few experiments.
I just bought a very small pullman loaf pan after nearly destroying the ceramic coating in my dutch oven after forgetting to properly lubricate it. My first loaf with it had mixed results; I tried baking a particularly hydrated loaf in it lined with parchment paper and because the paper was sloppily put together it ended up folding over the top and sticking to the dough. I didn't want to disturb the crust so I just let it bake that way and as a result the top ended up underbaked. That being said, the shape of it made the bread inherantly fulfilling in a way that I did not fully anticipate.
Last night I went to the grocery store and saw the packages of stollen and thought to myself I should make a whole wheat sugar and oil free version. At least I did for about a second before I realized it would just be bread again. I'm still tempted to make the whole sinful thing, but I really can't for the same reason why I didn't buy it at the store: I'd just end up eating the whole thing in one sitting. So if anyone in Southern California is making some, DM me your address so I can drive over to steal a slice. ;-)
Cardammon/Cinnamon rolls with almond flakes are my favorite and the one sweet I like the most. Relatively easy, don't need huge prep time, delicious.
I do on occasion other types like cheesecake (Basque/Spanish style), breads (substuting water with a dark beer can give it a strong flavor, although it makes it more dense), ricotta cookies (love how they can be shaped) and every year I do a Roscón de Reyes, a traditional 'cake' for January 6th in Spain.
I have a relative who does a cardamom shortbread that we love.
Everything you mentioned sounds delicious
I've been baking cookies recently:
Thumbprint shortbread cookies with a homemade strawberry rhubarb jam
Snickerdoodles
pfeffernusse (kind of like gingerbread, but less ginger spicy and more warming Chai spice)
I may bake some bread or make fresh pasta over the winter holiday. Depends what ends up inspiring me! The best part about any of these is being able to share it with others, so it's a good excuse to try a fun (new) project. In the summer, I end up making jams and other preserved foodstuffs a decent amount (candied or dried peppers, e.g.)