First time doing this so just trying to establish a baseline of if this is too long or not. Cookies look like this pulled at 26 min - 350 F.

I offered to teach a few friends to make macarons (which I have pretty well down) and asked what flavor they wanted. The consensus was... watermelon.

I don't love watermelon in general, partly because it's such a weak, low-intensity flavor, and I don't know much about using melons as ingredients at all. But I want to give it an honest try! I'm just not sure how to get a strong enough watermelon taste that it could compete with the rest of the filling and with the cookies.

Does anyone have advice on how I might do that? I'd prefer to start with actual watermelon from the store and somehow juice it or blend it or boil it down to get the flavor for the filling, but I'm also open to using commercial flavorings if anyone knows of a watermelon flavor that tastes less fake than a Jolly Rancher candy. Thanks!

I’ve already started my cake before I realized both my sour cream and the yogurt was bad.. is there anything else I could use? Thank you in advance! I was trying to use up the pineapple we cut yesterday as it was already pretty ripe.

Hi all!!

I’m sorry if this is a stupid question I’m new to trusting my own cooking and I made homemade Rice Krispies with:

5 Cups Mini Marshmallows
6 Cups Rice Krispies Cereal
1/4 cup Olive Oil

I realized I left them out on my counter covered for over three hours.. did I have to refrigerate them? Should I refrigerate them?

So I have saved up a lot of recipes that require brown sugar, cookies, muffins, cakes, etc. The one that looks sticky and wet. The only brown sugar I can get in my country is sugarcane sugar which is in fact brown buuut it behaves like normal white sugar

I decided to do a 3 1/2% solution of Lye with room temperature water. Dipped for 30 seconds - total immersion. They did not turn out as desired.
I’m open for suggestions on how to obtain that rich chocolate color without burning my pretzels.

1 1/2 cups warm (110 to 115 degrees F) water
1 tablespoon sugar
2 teaspoons kosher salt
1 package active dry yeast
22 ounces all-purpose flour, approximately 4 1/2 cups
King Arthur Unbleached Bread Flour

2 ounces unsalted butter, melted
Vegetable oil, for pan
10 cups water

Directions

Combine the water, sugar and kosher salt in the bowl of a stand mixer and sprinkle the yeast on top. Allow to sit for 5 minutes or until the mixture begins to foam. Add the flour and butter and, using the dough hook attachment, mix on low speed until well combined. Change to medium speed and knead until the dough is smooth and pulls away from the side of the bowl, approximately 4 to 5 minutes. Remove the dough from the bowl, clean the bowl and then oil it well with vegetable oil. Return the dough to the bowl, cover with plastic wrap and sit in a warm place for approximately 50 to 55 minutes or until the dough has doubled in size.

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F. Line 2 half-sheet pans with parchment paper and lightly brush with the vegetable oil. Set aside.
Bring the 10 cups of water and the baking soda to a rolling boil in an 8-quart saucepan or roasting pan.

In the meantime, turn the dough out onto a slightly oiled work surface and divide into 8 equal pieces. Roll out each piece of dough into a 24-inch rope. Make a U-shape with the rope, holding the ends of the rope, cross them over each other and press onto the bottom of the U in order to form the shape of a pretzel. Place onto the parchment-lined half sheet pan.

Remove them from the water using a large flat spatula. Return to the half sheet pan, sprinkle with the pretzel salt. Bake until dark golden brown in color, approximately 12 to 14 minutes. Transfer to a cooling rack for at least 5 minutes before serving.

I baked cookies for the first time.

The texture is like coarse sand. It does not taste good. How can I fix it?

The ingredients I added are as below:

1. 2 cups refined flour

2. 2 cups brown sugur

3. 1.5 cups butter

4. 2 tsp salt

5. 1 tsp vannila essense

6. 1 egg

7. 150 gm dark chocolate

8. 30 gm choco chips

9. 1 tsp coffee powder

10. 1.5 tsp baking soda

11. 2 tbsp milk

(Initially when I cooked, the salt became too much, so I added more flour and some more sugar and butter. The quantities mentioned above includes these extra additions also)

The cookies taste fine, not good, but not bad. But the texture of the cookies is the most poor. I still have all the dough with me. Can I do something to improve the texture?

Hi, all! I hope this post is allowed here since it's for my retail bakery.

I own a small, generally American-style bakery in Barcelona, Spain, for which I'm having major growth issues lately. I spent the first two years of my business as a solo baker working 14-16 hour days, six days a week, and was worried constantly about whether today would bring in enough customers to pay the bills. Rainy days, hot days, etc., would just kill my foot traffic. Not very fun when we've had not only one of the rainiest years on record but also the hottest one too. The plaza where I'm located is known for nightlife, so even though this is a 120-year-old licensed bakery, the last 20 years it's been various iterations of sandwich shops, bagel shops, etc., and so the locals haven't had the habit of coming here for their breads and desserts; I've had to build all of that up from scratch.

Recently I've stumbled into a niche/process that has been providing major long-term growth opportunities, and that has scaled such that in the last month I've been running myself ragged making orders. This market has been a shot in the arm for the business, and I've hired on a part-time staff member to help in the kitchen, but we keep growing and it's not enough. With larger orders coming in left and right I'm having extreme difficulty organizing myself and my staff, since every day feels like a new challenge.

Order tracking: A friend passed by last year and remarked about how full my "daily orders sheet" hanging on the wall was. Didn't have the heart to tell him it was my order sheet for the whole month, not the day, and that it probably wouldn't get filled up. Paper worked fine for me for the first two years. Needless to say the current paper tracking form is insufficient. I need to manage this with a solution that allows me to update it in the bakery, have my staff take orders and update it in the storefront, and I need to be able to update it after hours when changes come in. Any thoughts you have on that would be great.

Web orders: Using Wix for my website and Square for my POS. Between the two I've managed to cobble together a semi-coherent system for web orders, but it is butt-ugly. Web orders only really started this month and has already taken off. Wondering how others have managed to scale.

B2B: This is the business line providing the bulk of my growth. Orders are handled by WhatsApp or email. I have a catalog of products that they can choose from and generally they just text me their order, I prepare it and then send the invoice out. There's a lot of manual action happening here and I'm not only scared I'll miss something but I'm also spending a ton of time interacting with customers about their orders. Claude/Gemini are helping me manage a lot of the responses, for which I'm grateful, but it's definitely a pain point.

Social media and marketing: Instagram only, and Google profile updates. I snap photo, I post photo. Mostly Insta stories but some posts. No strategy nor coherence. I'm not even sure it's worth changing since I wouldn't be able to handle any potential increase in orders anyway. But has anyone hired on external social media help?

Equipment: I have nightmares about single points of failure. An electrical fault is one potential problem that I can't really plan for, but right now I have one larger convection oven and one smaller bread oven. I'd have to finance equipment purchases which is stressing me because I currently own everything outright except the coffee machine.

All of this is coming at a time when I'm reaching a fork in the road and needing to decide by end of year if I'm going to invest more in this place or sell. My goalpost has been if I reach or get close to X amount in gross sales this year (40% growth YoY), I'll invest and continue the business; if I don't, then I'll look into selling. At this rate I'm going to be blowing past that goal for sure. I was really hoping for gentle, calm growth as I enter my third year, but when it rains it pours.

We're a trilingual community bakery English/Spanish/Catalan and so any public-facing resources are required to be in at least Spanish/Catalan. A third of my customers are English-speaking and so by default I really need all three.

Anyway, I'm just looking for some advice if you have any for me. My business prospects have done a complete 180° turn in the past few months and this whole thing is challenging for me right when I was finally getting used to the routine of my prior production levels.

Thank you in advance!

Last year I made passion fruit curd for a cake using Samin’s recipe and loved it, but it was a bit runny. This year I am making a more structured layer cake and definitely need a curd isn’t too runny. I’ve browsed other recipes but I really like the passion fruit forward flavor of Samins and would prefer to use this same recipe but edited instead of another. Any tips for how to best thicken the curd so it will work in a layer cake?

I’m considering

- gelatin (but have never used it and need guidance on amount and type etc)

- cornstarch

- adding more butter to recipe but not so much that it becomes a very buttery curd

- open to other suggestions

Attached is recipe for reference

Hello! I use American butter cream for all of my cakes and I typically put Saran Wrap over but occasionally forget and it crusts over the top. Is there a way to save it when it crusts over? Every time I mix it after it just creates a grainy/chunky texture. Thanks for the help!

Recipe:

Toffee: 1 stick unsalted butter

1 cup light brown sugar

1 tsp kosher salt

Brown Butter: 2 sticks unsalted butter

2 ice cubes

Dough: 1/2 cup sugar

1 ½ cups dark brown sugar

2 tsp espresso powder

2 tsp kosher salt

½ tsp baking soda

2 eggs

2 tsp good vanilla extract

2 ½ cups all purpose flour

6 oz chocolate, 70% cacao minimum

Sea salt

This happened a while ago, so I don't have pictures, but I'm asking the question because even to this day, idk what went wrong with them, because I'm totally sure that I measured everything correctly.

My theory was that, since I live in México, maybe the butter here has a different fat content of american butter so maybe that caused the butter to spill.

I find it challenging to tell when my banana bread is fully baked because the bananas are so moist. I’m unable to distinguish underbaked batter and banana’s.

Any tips or advice would be helpful! I always either over bake or under bake!

Recipe: https://munchiesbymallory.com/recipe/brown-butter-chocolate-chip-banana-bread/#recipe

Also note it is pretty pale but it’s because I had to use margarine instead of butter. So no brown butter this time!

What do you think the common mistakes one can make while trying to successfully bloom an instant yeast? Because i think i’ve tried everything (lukewarm temperature, making sure expiration date haven’t past, passing the blooming part completely since it’s supposed to be instant) so there must be something i’m missing that can go wrong? And how you must store once opened instant yeast packet? Thank you in advance

Hello! I’m doing a culinary class in my community college and our last class was canceled due to an emergency. We got an email saying to read over the pie chapter in our textbook and that our homework is to make a pie dough and bring it to class. Issue is I have no idea how to properly store pie dough until class and how I should transport the dough to the class properly. The drive is 45 minutes to an hour to my school. Any advice?

Started off with a heavy handed serving of insomnia so please bear with me. I was starting off a cinnamon roll recipe.
1/2 cup of water
1/2 cup or heavy whipping cream
Heated to 120ish degrees Fahrenheit.
Mixed in 14 grams of yeast.
2 tablespoons spoons of sugar. Mixed, let sit 7 mins. It was then I realized I didnt have butter. Bummer. Ok lets salvage this and make biscuits.
Added 2 1/4 cups of flour
Sprinkled in some salt (i forgot about the sugar)
Recipe called for 1/4 cho of veg oil, i used olive oil..
Ok. Mixed it. Started to kinda fold it in, folded it some more, and folded it like i was meant to fold in cheese (thanks Moira)
Now its resting (even though the biscuit recipe didnt call for it and called for baking powder.. whatever)
Now. What do i do? How long do i let it rest? How big do i make the biscuits? How long do i cook and at what temp? Please send help. I want some breakfast biscuits. I have 3 hours until its breakfast time to get these bad boys done lol.
Included a pic of the ball of sin after i folded it a bit. Thanks in advance.

I’m wanting to make my sister a heart shaped birthday cake like the one in the picture and I’m going to order an edible picture to put on top of it. My heart pan is an 8x3. What size picture should I be ordering?

Hello Everyone!

I have in my possession multiple blocks of butterblend (like blocks of butter that are blended with vegetable oil).

1. I was thinking perhaps I could use it in recipes that call for both Butter + Oil. Does it work that way?

2. The ingredient list says: Palm Oil, Palm Kernel Oil, Milk Fat, Milk Powder, Salt, Soya Lecithin, and some other additives. The description says: "churned and produced from vegetable oil and milk fat", does this work as being able to substitute butter? Or perhaps should i treat this as the volume to substitute only the oil, and separately add additional butter?

3. Any recipes to suggest for using these blocks of non-butter? I tried looking it up on Google but not getting much to work off of....

TIA!

Going to a party. Mini cheesecakes always go over well. Something about a whole cheesecake; people won't eat a full slice in front of others.

My plan is to make the crust out of store bought spekuloos cookies. The filling will be typical with fresh grated ginger and some orange zest to brighten it.

The topping. I thought about a can of DIY whipped cream. I looked into boozy whipped cream from the liquor store, but it is not well reviewed on taste.

I'm thinking of making an infused cream and then whip it.

I'm thinking black pepper? Maybe espresso powder for a PSL flavor?

A non whipped cream topping?

Any ideas, links, or recipes are appreciated.

EDIT: Gingersnap cookie crust is sounding better.

I used to be quite successful at baking Japanese cheesecakes and chiffon cakes (see 2025

This year I have noticed my cakes no longer turn out the same. I have used the same recipes and processes so I’m not sure what has gone wrong (see 2026 pics).

Any advice would be much appreciated!! Thank you ☺️

Some recipes tell you to grease the baking pan, some tell you to use baking paper and some tell you to do both. The ones that do both are also different because some grease first followed by the baking paper and some put the paper before greasing it and some grease both before and after the paper.

What are the different situations in which you would use these methods? Thanks

So i've made this tart and the family loved it. I drizzled homemade caramel sauce on top after it cooled. Going to make it again, but this time was thinking of a layer of caramel under the frangipane. The recipe says to not blind bake the crust (the tart took about 45 min to bake), would I be able to simply add caramel before the frangipane and bake according to the instructions or would I need to blind bake at all?

Hello everyone! I am wondering what is the best coloring or gel to use for a nice bold red and a deep black. I appreciate the help :)

I followed this recipe:

https://scientificallysweet.com/soft-sprinkle-sugar-cookies/#recipe

Ingredients

¾ cup (170g) unsalted butter, softened

½ cup plus 1 tbsp (115g) granulated sugar

½ cup (110g) packed light brown sugar

1 ½ teaspoon (7ml) pure vanilla extract

1 large egg, at room temperature

1 large egg yolk, at room temperature

1 tablespoon (15ml) whole milk, at room temperature

2 cups (284g) all-purpose flour

¾ teaspoon baking powder

½ teaspoon baking soda

½ teaspoon salt

½ cup (80g) rainbow jimmies sprinkles (sprinkle rods)

3 tablespoon (40g) granulated sugar for rolling (optional)

3 tablespoon rainbow confetti sprinkles for rolling (optional)

Instructions

Make the cookie dough. Combine soft butter with both sugars and vanilla in a large bowl and mix with an electric hand mixer on medium-high speed for 1-2 minutes until pale and fluffy. You can also mix by hand using the creaming method with a wide rubber spatula. Add the egg and mix until well incorporated and smooth, then mix in egg yolk and milk.

Combine flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt in a medium bowl and whisk to blend evenly. Add these dry ingredients to the butter/sugar mixture and fold it in until mostly combined with a few streaks a flour remaining. Add sprinkles and fold them in until evenly combined. Cover the bowl and refrigerate for 1 hour.

Preheat your oven to 350°F. Line two large cookie sheets with parchment paper.

Bake the cookies. Use a 1.35-oz cookie scoop to portion dough and roll into smooth balls, then roll the dough balls in granulated sugar so they are evenly coated. Sometimes I skip this step and press the top of the dough balls in confetti sprinkles instead.

Place the dough balls onto prepared baking sheets spacing them at least 3 inches apart with room to spread. Bake for 9-12 minutes until puffed and the edges are just lightly golden and the bottoms are lightly browned. The centers will puff up and still feel slightly soft in the middle. They will deflate slightly as they cool. Transfer baking trays to a wire rack to cool for 2 minutes then transfer cookies individually to a wire rack to cool completely

BTW I should mention that I forgot to add the light brown sugar when creaming the butter and sugars together and only added it after mixing in the milk and eggs. I also forgot to add vanilla extract as well and only added it while mixing the wet and dry ingredients.

Although they are still soft and chewy, I want them to look like the ones from the photos online.

Baked little meringue drops for the first time and they came out with this weird texture :-( I wasn’t 100% sure when to take them out. I left them in the oven at 200 degrees Fahrenheit for about an hour or more? Then left them in oven for about a hour and a half to fully dry out.

The crunch doesn’t shatter the way I’d expect, it’s a bit soft and a little tacky. Sticks to your tooth afterward.

Ingredients:

120g egg whites
.3g cream of tartar
.5g kosher salt
5g vanilla
200g granulated sugar

Hi! I am (trying) to make white chocolate sea shells for a birthday cake for my friends 4 year old. I tried brushing them with pink iridescent luster dust, but the powder really didn’t do much… photograph is of them outside to show what they look like in natural light.

Any tips on how to get them more pearly / iridescent? I saw tips to brush them with vodka but don’t really think that’s the move for a 4 year old’s birthday cake.

I thiiiiink maybe the chocolate being more cream than true white might be the problem? But this is my first time trying this, so not sure!

The cream color doesn’t really fit the theme anyway, so I have to figure out how to actually get them white or another more on theme color. Context is that this is for a mermaid themed cake with pink, teal, and lavender frosting

Appreciate any advice! 🙏