Convection oven cooking

DH bought a tabletop oven/convection oven today. As the kitchen I cook in for our club twice a month has no oven (and getting someone to buy one is another story!), we plan to cart it there, and bake there. The cottage food laws in PA state that, if you've ever had a pet in the kitchen you plan to cook the food you sell, you cannot do that.  Sooooo...this means I take my dessert show on the road! We want to keep ownership of it, so we can use it at home; saves heating up the big oven and running up the electric bill. I bake a dessert for every club meeting (since I'm not selling it, and it's only for the club, it's legal, in case you are wondering). I may decide to use it at home even if just for that purpose.

Anyway...does anyone use one for baking cakes, cookies, etc., and how do they turn out? I just made brownie mix "muffins" . I wanted to experiment with my muffin pans, as I usually bake cupcakes when I bake for others, but I was too lazy to make cupcakes from scratch, and already had the mix laying around. I think they turned out well.  As the pans are coated, I lowered the temperature in addition to the cooking time, but had to keep baking them; I think I made the temperature too low at first.

My oven has a convection setting, but I've never used it. :anon: I know some people love it though. :nod:

I used to be able to switch my oven from conventional to convection, but it's on its last legs. A convection oven is much better for baking anything but yeast dough. It's faster, you can bake at a lower temperature, and stuff rises more evenly.

The microwave can also be switched to convection, but I've rarely used it.

I've found convection ovens work great for baking. My oven will switch between the two. With temperature, a good rule of thumb is to drop the baking temp by 20°C (so a cake that would normally bake at 180°C conventional bakes at 160°C for the same length of time).

My oven uses both regular heating and convection. When I'm using convection, I set it for the regular temperature (cake would be 350 F, for example) and the oven will automatically set itself for 325 F. It is a lot quicker, but all ovens are different, so I hesitate to say "Bake the cookies for 5 minutes" or something like that. I can say that I can throw 4 large sheets of cookies in the oven and bake them all at the same time when using convection. When I'm using convection for roasts and for acorn squash, I always use the oven probe; that way, there's no over-under cooking. 

Our old Sharp microwave was also convection and I got a very nice convection cookbook with it. That really helped.