Hi! We have many new members joining, to make existing HO and new HO members to know each other better, why not introduce yourselves?
I LOVE baking! I’m especially enamored with all things lemon. Even things that aren’t a lemon dish, I’ll try to add some lemon to it. I recently discovered lemon oil, which I add in small amounts to up the lemon flavor. My favorite dessert is a lemon curd tart. But when I don’t want to make a whole tart, I’ll just put the lemon curd into individual serving cups and allow myself one serving a day.
I love a good no knead bread, Warm bread with butter is a meal for me.
The dessert that most people talk about wanting every season is my pumpkin spiced cheesecake with a graham cracker crust. It’s aggresively spiced, including the crust. I’ve also made it into cheesecake bars, and those were a hit as well.
If you invite me somewhere, chances are I’ll show up with something baked. I like to “try out” new recipes this way, and get honest feedback from prople. And also, fewer leftover to need to consume myself!
Welcome to everyone who’s come over from Chowhound. I am a former Chowhound poster myself. So glad to see everyone here, adding great content to this board!
Definite weakness for home baked goods here. My favourite things to bake are sourdough breads. I’d say the ones I’m most proud of are the naturally leavened 100% ryes using freshly ground grains. No pretense here, just a real love of rustic flavours and a quest for self-reliance. My goal is to bake bread using grains I have grown and processed.
Best received desserts? Tough one because everyone has such different preferences. Steamed syrup pudding, Chelsea buns and oatmeal cookies are the ones topping the list at the moment. That’s sure to change as the weather warms up.
In my household, I try my hand at baking, my wife is the one directing many of the recipes in my direction. Since, I’m an eager beginner, I’m pretty game to just try. I also bake with family, neighbors and some of my guitar students.
Here to learn, share and continue to be a part of this fun, creative community.
Same here! We are generally a low-carb household so I don’t do as much baking as I would like, but when I do, it’s usually bread or pizza dough made with natural yeast. Seeing those little beasties thrive is so satisfying!
Love this!
I don’t really have a specialty but I LOVE sweet desserts as opposed to savory pastries.
I’m most proud of mastering macarons - I always wanted to make them and finally took a class at Sugar Glider Kitchen in VT and that was all I needed (and tips from Skleg who hopefully sees this!) This pic is from the dinner after my daughter’s bat mitzvah - every time that I was stressed I made macarons and froze them, and then served them for dessert. Huge hit!
The dessert that is the best received is the chocolate cake with pb frosting and chocolate ganache from SK. I’ve made it annually since my teenager was a toddler, and it gets devoured. It’s very easy to make, which makes me laugh that the easiest dessert is the best received, but there you go!
That’s professional looking, those macaron!!
Great thread, @naf!
Novice baker here, and have learned a lot through and from the expert CH baking threads and bakers!
I do small-batch baking for myself (so I’m always halving and quartering recipes) and always in my toaster oven but I enjoy baking more when I’m making something to take to friends or family.
I’d say my field of interest is experimenting with (ie going down rabbit holes) and perfecting simple recipes — for example I went through a brownie phase, an (orange) olive oil cake phase, a lemon buttermilk/yogurt cake phase, and so on. Each of them yielded a favorite recipe or two (two because sometimes I like one version and friends/family prefer and request another hahaha).
I also enjoy playing with Indian flavors in western baked goods, or making something that is reminiscent of a (completely differently prepared) Indian dessert.
During the pandemic I did a lot of gluten free baking because most of the family I was with for the year were gluten free (at the time) — including gluten free bagels that were as good as any bagel I’ve bought (I’m based in NYC)
My best received dessert last year was a Rasmalai Cake for Diwali — a riff on ricotta cake and tres leches cake, both of which I love. My favorite was a Gulab Jamun Cake also made for Diwali. But the one I’m most proud of is the eggless, (white) sugar-free chocolate ganache cake I just made for mom’s 80th birthday that she enjoyed to the last crumb 
— the first thing I’ve ever baked for her!
.
I’ve always been more of a cook than a baker.
I can bake simple things such as scones, bread (nothing fancy like with a sour dough starter) cookies, brownies, cakes and pies.
My decorating abilities aren’t as artistic as @Nannybakes and many others on the baking forum from CH.
Or the amazing macarons like @sallyt…yet.
I’m most proud of making a souffle and Yorkshire pudding that turned out well, the first time around, without deflating.
My most requested dessert is a blueberry cake with a port reduction and cornmeal.
Brava, Olunia….I’m sure you excel at what you bake!!
Wow these look beautiful 
i must say
I’m always the odd one here, because I live in France, my desserts are mostly French influenced.
Like @Olunia, my passion starts with cooking, since 3 years, I start to like baking more and more. My interest is vast, since covid, I learn to make my own sourdough bread, still in the beginner stage. For desserts, I like tarts and entremet cakes. I’m also interest in learning to make viennoiserie, the breakfast or teatime pastries.
Recipes in French language are indicated with *
Most proud cake, there are 2:
The Moroccan influenced French dessert Choux puff pastry of Jardin de l’Atlas (Recipe* by Pierre Hermé) . It’s one of the most complicated cake I’ve made, there are 6 elements: puff pastry/ orange blossom mascarpone cream/ honey cream/ brittany butter lemon biscuit/ orange confiture / fresh lemon/ - After making this pastry, I dare to try to make more complicated stuff
Strawberry tart with verbana (recipe* by Yann Couvreur) almond cream and verbana jelly, verbana cream, citrus syrup, strawberries
Made 2 of these tarts to celebrate 50 years old birthday of my neighbour.
Most liked dessert:
Lime tart (recipe by Jacques Genin)
French people are crazy about lemon / lime dessert. This one has a good balance of tartness and sweetness. People think eating this won’t get fat too! lol
Dark chocolate flan (recipe* by Yann Brys)
Chocolate is the first fetish here.
Been lazy and busy lately, so back to baking sooooon!
Love both of your desserts! Your mom must be very proud of you!
Both sounds good! What type of souffle are you making? I’ve made maybe twice.
The bars sound amazing.
What grain are you growing?
Dammit, you’ll hit off with H, he has the exactly same interest as you. Well, luckily he is not a member of HO, I won’t allow. 
They must be really happy to have you around! What do you make for them?
Hello! I’m Mig, and was “migmigmig” on Chowhound. I was based on Brooklyn until the pandemic, when I temporarily (hah) returned home to PA to weather the virus with my mom.
I’ve been “baking online” since my days on ECHO, the early-internet bulletin board founded in NYC in 1990. Despite not having a clue what I was doing, I got my first paid cooking gig from ECHO - catering a dessert reception for the wedding of two ECHO friends. Among the 90 guests were two well-known cookbook authors; I’m grateful I didn’t know they’d be there ahead of time. I remember I made a three-tiered lemon poppy-seed cake (it was January - no seasonal fruit around) from a Martha Stewart recipe, and I attempted (but failed) to make my first-ever semifreddo. Part of my payment for that gig was a daffodil-yellow Kitchen Aid mixer that I still use today, 20+ years later.
My baking style (all sweet - I don’t get excited about bread) is very much homespun, seasonal, and fruit-intensive. I don’t have any visual gifts, so making highly stylized or conventionally pretty things is really difficult for me. Relatedly, I have a built-in aversion to food that looks way better than it tastes (most wedding cake, gigantic uber-American cupcakes, out-of-season strawberries, most “French” pastry made in the US., etc.)
One thing I’m proud of having made is bespoke chocolate-chip cookies for another friend’s very fancy, black-tie NYC wedding. Her mother (who was paying for it all) insisted on a traditional tiered cake for dessert, over her daughter’s strenuous objection. So my friend hired me to make a second dessert, her true heart’s desire: her favorite kind of cc cookie - big, wrinkly around the edges, etc. City Bakery’s (RIP!) ccc’s were a particular inspiration. I spent several months testing recipes until I found the winner. I was also a guest at the wedding, so I got to see people’s reactions when the cookies were served. I’ll never forget it.
My main passion is the entire pantheon of rustic American fruit desserts (crumbles/crisps/grunts/brown betties/slumps/pies.) Whatever fruit is in season locally, I bake with it obsessively for those few weeks; then I move on.
Other favorites are making homemade ice cream, Christmas cookies and holiday baking, and baking with the homemade fruit jams I can in the summertime. During the months without fresh local fruit for baking, I bake a lot of Bundt cakes. I confess I had a sourdough phase at the beginning of the pandemic, but my favorite thing about it was using the discard for things other than bread.
I learned a ton from the other bakers on Chowhound, and especially enjoyed threads where we took on a cookbook together, or cooked the same dish together (“OK everybody make cheesecake this month! Let’s compare!”) Looking forward to continuing to learn here on HO 
Oh, and this photo is a wedding I catered just last October - all bundts
I have a feeling that, without amendment to soil ph, it’s probably going to be rye. Thanks to Stanley Ginsberg, I’ve been able to turn out 100% rye loaves that are excellent. His book, The Rye Baker, has been instrumental in building my confidence baking with a grain that handles very differently than wheat. He also has a website:
Again, just an excellent, excellent resource.
