I’m finally making the plunge to getting a bread maker, now that the price of bread has gone up to a stupid amount and I finally realized four months of buying bread every other day will pay for the machine itself. (Flour is cheap, yeast is cheap.) There are only really three machines available where I live, so I’m pretty set on the machine itself.

Since I’ve never had a bread maker, do y’all have any advice, favorite recipes, suggestions?

Long story short, I’ve gotten very tired of buying junky pans that start getting rusty, etc. really quickly.

At the moment, I’m trying to find some good metal pans for baking things like brownies and focaccia, so probably 8x8 and/or 9x13.

Anyone have any good brand recommendations?

So I normally don't care that much about food. But I just got introduced to r/ididnthaveeggs which is a repository of insane and ridiculous recipe substitutions from the comments sections of recipes. Even with zero knowledge of cooking, I know swapping carrot for shredded kale in a carrot cake recipe will not turn out well.

So cooks and food-eaters of Tildes, what are the most insane and ridiculous substitutions you've encountered or heard of? Especially curious if you've had the (mis)fortune of getting to try the innovative recipe for yourself.

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.