Related

• Hygroscopy — holds moisture, extends shelf life, and softens crumb
• Browning — caramelisation and the Maillard reaction, and why a sugar-rich dough colours long before it is cooked through
• Aeration — creaming sugar into solid fat, the mechanical leavening step behind most butter cakes; see cakes and yeast and leavening
• Fermentation — a food source for yeast, up to the point where the osmotic pressure starts working against it; see baking fats on enrichment
• Spread — in cookies, sugar melts and the dough flows; the ratio of sugar to flour and fat is most of what decides thick versus thin. The working threshold that page uses: below about 0.8 sugar to flour by weight a dough holds its shape with no chilling at all, and above about 1.1 it needs cold, a hotter oven, or more flour to stop it running.

• Granulated, caster, and the effect of crystal size on creaming
• Brown sugar and the molasses in it — an acid, so it interacts with baking soda; see yeast and leavening
• Icing sugar and its cornstarch
• Liquid sugars: honey, maple, molasses, malt. Each brings water, so a formula written for granulated needs adjusting; see baker's percentages
• Diastatic malt as a browning and yeast-activity aid in bread

sugar production carries the site's pages on the production side.

Sugar alternatives behave very differently from each other in an oven — some brown, some do not; some carry bulk, some are used in milligram quantities and leave a hole in the recipe where the bulk was. Any substitution needs testing rather than a conversion chart.

• Bulk sweeteners versus high-intensity sweeteners
• What is lost when sugar is cut: moisture, browning, spread, keeping quality
• Dietary context — see eating restriction, healthy eating, and nutrition and supplements

cakes · cookies · baking fats · flour · no-bake desserts · Baked goods · chocolate chip cookies — the brown-to-white sugar ratio worked through on one recipe