Tips for Classic Cakes and Cookies
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Every professional baker has plenty of recipes. What you do with those recipes is what keeps your cakes and cookies bakery-quality. 
Professional cookies should be perfectly moist on the inside and crispy on the outside no matter how large the batch. Bakery cakes need not only to meet those specifications but to hold icing firmly. When your baked goods taste as good as they look, word spreads. With the aid of these hints and state of the art bakery equipment, your sales will soar.
Creating Cakes That Sell
One of the simplest – and easiest to forget – tricks of the trade when baking large numbers of cakes in one oven at the same time is to leave approximately 2 inches between each pan and between the pans and the walls of the oven. Add moisture to particularly heavy cakes by placing a pan of water in the oven and keeping it there throughout the baking time. Prevent unsightly cracks by adding plain gelatin to your batter. Beating the egg yolks with the butter and sugar results in a sweeter cake without the need for a great deal of sugar. Go on to beat the whites well before adding them to achieve a lighter effect. ...continue reading
Pastry Pointers: Perfect Dough and Crusts
The foundation of many desserts is a crisp, flaky crust or tender dough. As a professional chef, you need to make sure that you achieve consistent results to satisfy your customers every time. Using the right baking techniques and bakery equipment will help you attain this goal. Whether you 
serve your guests cream puffs, éclairs, pies, or tarts, use these tips to produce the highest quality dough and crust.
Choux Pastry Tips
Making choux pastry, the dough used in cream puffs and éclairs, is a delicate art. One of the most important but often skipped steps in the process of making this particular kind of dough is that of weighing your ingredients. Use a bakery scale to ensure that your proportions are always exact and that the resulting dough will be perfectly light. Once you have mixed the dough, avoid letting it dry on the stove. Letting it dry like this is another common mistake: the water makes the dough rise. During baking, it is even more crucial than for other types of fare not to open the door as the dough needs to rise at a precise rate and leaving the door closed prevents the pastries from falling. ...continue reading
Baking Sheet Overload
Baking sheets (sheet pans) seem to be our biggest seller these days, and I'm not surprised. Having just wrapped up my holiday baking (final count LESS my husband's taste-testing abuse was more than 2,600 cookies). I couldn't have done it without commercial baking pans.