AWKWARD ZOMBIE

No, not the food, but me.

So this is a thread because baking is hella ballin and lots of people think it's hard. But it's not! It simply takes a lot of precision. So I'm here to help you learn how do that because everyone should bake more. Baking is great.

First things first: read your recipe. Read it again. Read it again. Read it again. Get a really good idea of the ingredients and the order. For recipes with multiple parts this is especially important. Do you make the mousse before the ganache? How long do you freeze the dough for? These are all really important things to know! Because if you just read the recipe as you going to go along it's going to say something like "freeze for two hours" and you'll be fucked. And that's no fun.

Anyway! The main point of this thread is baking tips and tricks and important things to do etc. Also some recipe sharing cause I have some pretty ballin recipes.

So what we're going to talk about today is kinds of chocolate! This is very, very important. Not all chocolates are created equal and if you use shitty chocolate you'll end up with a shitty product. So let's get started! Also milk chocolate is for scrubs only use it if the recipes calls for it. Most of the time a (good) recipe calls for bittersweet or unsweetened.

Kinds of chocolate:
Hershey's: Shit tier chocolate. It doesn't bake well and also it is awful chocolate, only use it for eating and s'mores.
Scharffen Berger: Not a bad chocolate, but extremely fruity. The unsweetened is good for baking but the bittersweet has a very distinctive, fruity taste that not everyone likes. A good chocolate otherwise.
Lindt: Incredibly sweet, okay for baking. Tends to be overpowering.
Valrhona: A fantastic chocolate. Very rich and deep and works wonderfully for baking. It's expensive, though, so that's something to keep in mind.
TCHO: Not bad stuff. Good for baking but not very memorable.
Callebaut: Also a fantastic chocolate. Has a nice deep flavor, and the chocolate taste lingers. Also expensive and a hard chocolate so it can be difficult to cut.
Kraft Baker's Chocolate: Barely above Hershey's. Really bland.

Verdict: Callebaut and Valrhona are your best bets, thought I have a preference for Callebaut. Valrhona and Callebaut can be found at specialty food stores and Valrhona can be bought as chocolate bars at Trader Joe's.

Now go out and bake.

Heck yes baking! I really need to find the time to bake soon.

Also, I'm sure there's some good baked goods with bacon in them.... somewhere.

I baked brownies once.



...needless to say, I don't bake very often. And yes, that is a solid brick of brownies. It smelled delicious and was hard as a rock.

Aww, I thought this was about bacon, but it was about Bacon.

I love baking bread, though I wish I had the proper stuff to let it proof, and a dough hook for the mixer we have would be wonderful.

only thing I love more is making pasta.

baked

or wrought in a forge

I made pancakes with bacon inside them yesterday. They were good.

I don't do a lot of baking, but I'm told my peanut butter cookies are to die for, and even when I make double batches they're gone by the next day. They melt in your mouth and are soft on the inside and crisp on the outside. Also I usually make them shaped like hearts. I don't make them often, though, because my parents complain I'm ruining their diets, haha.

But yeah, it's very important not to do things out of order. For example, the dough for my cookies has to chill for about two hours. If you don't do it long enough, the cookies are too soft and never get crisped/brown properly.

Kaizo needs to create a full suit of brownie plate armor.

Also Hershey bars are not chocolate. To be chocolate it must have cocoa butter in it somewhere. Since they do not, it's like chocolate-flavored rather than actual chocolate. The chips are god-tier for cookies though.

I've been meaning to bake bread for a pretty long time now but I never got around to it. I think we have almost every ingredient I could ever need for almost any type of bread.

On another note my friend brought over some orange cupcakes his mom made today. They tasted really good. Had some type of meringue icing and candied orange peels on top.

I can operate a toaster pretty well, does that count?

Today I made cinnamon buns, they are completly perfect and nice and soft and spongy inside.

I've eaten like 5 already.

Dont touch my buns.

I was planning on baking some rye bread because reading up on it, its history just sounds so awesome.

So I went shopping today for some rye flour. Can't find that shit anywhere nearby, not within any commercial grocery shops. Gonna have to go find some in some smaller shop somewhere.

Bacon, what is your opinion on Tollhouse brand chocolate?