I adore holiday baking! Every year for as long as I can remember, my cousin would come over to my house and we would bake an entire day away. We bake the same recipes every year, but since we've gotten older we've added a few new ones to our repertoire. Palmiers, most recently.

Afterwards, we send of packages of treats to friends and relatives and 'sample' what's left.

Second homemaking 101. Love to bake and have already baked and frosted a batch of holiday cookies to mail off. Don't worry so much about how pies look--they are so much better tasting when homemade!

I also don't make very pretty pies, but I just flop the crust over and call them rustic galettes. Or, I opt for tarts, which generally look fancier but are easier.

I'm always worried that I'm going to burn whatever I'm baking but at the same time I worry that things are under-cooked. I know the typical techniques for checking done-ness. It's just stressful to me.

Why not make a French-style tart? The lovely, seasonal fruit becomes the star of the show, atop a layer of crème patissière, glazed and lovely!

All baking is a hang-up for me. I don't bake for the holidays or any other time of year. I'm a good cook, but a terrible baker (I've even messed up boxed cake mix!) I hate that you just follow the recipe and then stick it in the oven and hope for the best, with no possibility of adjusting ingredients. And it seems like bakers just know things that non-bakers do not- like how do you adjust baking time and temp if you do not have the same size pan as the recipe calls for? And sometimes ingredients should be cold, but other ingredients should be at room temperature. I feel like I missed out on some of this basic knowledge because my parents did not bake. My dinner guests are always served ice cream for dessert, I'm afraid.

I just can't wrap my head around the fact that doubling a recipe (muffins, cake,etc) does not work!! Why not?!!! Any ideas anyone?

I look forward to holiday baking! I can't explain it but certain recipes- certain cookies, rum cake, etc in particular, I feel like I'm only allowed to make around the holidays!
That said, the only pressure I get is often that I'm pretty advanced when it comes to decorating and Christmas cookies and the like, rather than homemade messy cookies of my childhood, family and friends have come to expect elaborately piped, glittered, cookies and treats. It's quite an undertaking!

This is my first year with a baby too, which takes a huge toll on my free time. Leisurely nights to bake a cake for the next day have become frantic rushes to get things in the oven and cleaned up in time to not fall asleep at the sink!

My kitchen creates my hang-ups. The counter space I have is small and very segmented, so having working space is frustrating when I'm trying to do my holiday bake-a-thons!

I can not for the life of me bake a tasty flakey pie crust. I am on a mission to succeed this year. Which means my family and friends are going to have to eat all of my attempts until I am triumphant.

@Lisa@bitesforbabies: It does work. I double, tripple recipes all the time. Sometimes you have to change the baking time a bit if you're making a bigger cake or so, but then I find you can never trust the baking time anyway.... I am really not sure what kind of problems you could have by doubling the recipe. Maybe you made a mistake and didn't calculate all the ingredients properly?

I'm not a huge fan of baking but I love eating baked goods! So I do some holiday baking. My biggest issue is crimping a pie crust. This should be easy but I can never do it so it looks pretty.

As of late, my baking hang-up has been failing to keep my pantry adequately stocked. The other day I tried to make pumpkin donuts, only to realize I was out of sugar!

I also suffer the curse of inadequate counter space, inadequate pantry and inadequate pie crust. My crust is tasty, but I always have a hard time transferring it from the counter to the pie plate.

I'm scared of making pastry!

I'm so afraid of yeast baking...and then always amazed when something actually rises LOL

I also double things all the time with great results. I used to have problems sometimes until I started penciling the doubled quantity in next to the ingredients list in the recipe. Otherwise it is just so easy to forget to double a single ingredient, which can have disastrous consequences. I remember once freshman year of high school I made cookies for a boy and tried to double the recipe but screwed up the quantity of flour. They were terrible but I knew he liked me because he pretended like they were great!

Other than writing in the new quantities I make sure I am using big enough cooking and mixing vessels, especially if the dough will be rising.

Is there a particular recipe you've been having trouble doubling?

I have a difficult time making cakes from scratch. More often than not, they fall. Can't figure out what goes wrong or what I did right.

Any recipe that doesn't specify the size or volume of the dish I will be cooking/baking it in. This is a common issue I've come to expect from some of my more vintage cookbooks, but I just tried a new, relatively simple breakfast casserole recipe from a Well Known TV Chef wherein it became apparent too late that "Casserole Dish" is not a standard measure. (wound up throwing away some portion of a couple of ingredients and increased the cooking time by about 30%. It worked out OK in the end, but it was still f-ing annoying.)

Baking is easy. Try making candy...

Make sure that you have ice cold water and cold fat (Butter, crisco, etc.) Once combined wrap it in plastic wrap and let it rest in the fridge for about 1/2 and hour. That should help.

Agreed. I used to make beautiful pies every time, but since moving to Arizona, I haven't succeeded even once. I wonder if it's the difference in humidity? I don't even try anymore.

I love to bake, but my biggest issue when baking for a specific event is that I'm never sure how long something will stay fresh-tasting, so I feel like I have to wait til the night before to bake everything which is very time consuming and stressful (esp when one has a full-time job). I always like to make a dessert tin for each of my co-workers for Christmas, but making 6 different types of desserts to fill tins for 20 people a night or 2 (at the most) before is tiring.

My other issue is sugar cookies with royal icing. Each year I dream of making beautifully decorated sugar cookies, I make the dough, do the cut outs, make frosting and by then I'm either too tired or too impatient to bother with the piping and flooding and just end up smearing it on.

@pleiovn, I don't make pies much, but humidity can definitely affect baked goods. I live by the gulf coast of TX, so I have this problem a lot. I'm baking away now that we've had a cold front the last 2 days- perfect cookie weather!

@Lisa, I've never had a problem doubling a recipe. What type of issues do you end up having?

I have never made candy. Even the last time i made flan I made my mother melt the sugar for it. As for pies... mine are always delicious, but there's not a crust I haven't cursed at while trying to roll the darned thing out.

Once we moved to New England, I conquered making fudge. But I still can't get pie crust right. It's infuriating. It ALWAYS shrinks.