Still looking for ideas, but here's a bit of an update for whomever might actually care about this kind of thing:
(1) The "feel" of the Baking tradeskill: I want the tradeskill to feel whimsical, and the sense of having interesting fun recipes that aren't "raid competitive functional" is not a problem for me. There will always be mix/maxers that figure out the "right food" to use, and if they decide that stat food is finally worth considering for raids, then that's great, but it's not something that warrants significant effort on the side of designing balanced parallel stat food options for each role in a raid. I'd probably have Tarutao eat his lower-stat Mistwood Vinefruit Salad for the lulz instead. Fun and whimsy are appropriate for this tradeskill in ways that wouldn't work for Fletching.
(2) The outline for the tradeskill: similar to the varnish arrows of Fletching, I think a soft-tiering of recipes is appropriate. Perhaps for the 40ish to 80ish range of Baking, you're making various cooked meats. Then perhaps from 80ish to 120ish you'd making produce-related recipes, then a range for making fish dishes and desserts, then at the very top end, you'd make the most difficult of recipes from all types. Within each range there would be recipes for whom the components are more easily obtained than others with the tradeoff of being less creative and more expensive and having lower stats.
To this end, I'm working to categorize the recipe ideas I do have. Side note: this thread has been great help for that, and even though I've heard people make comments like "that post is stupid because it just had 40 sushi recipes in it", I've appreciated it very much, and the outline of the tradeskill and its progression should and hopefully will reflect that.
(3) I'm still up for getting a lot more ideas. Unlike Fletching, this tradeskill will be receptive by design to the addition of new recipes even after its "done". If you have an idea for a four-hundred-and-twenty-seventh sushi recipe, post it anyway. If you have a crazy idea like "Frosthorn Gnoll Ears cooked over heated Halfling Kneecaps", then post that, too.
(4) Speaking of crazy ideas, I'm wanting to get some variant of "Braised Newport Guardsman Flank Steak" to work. It seems as easy as adding the meats to the loot table of any NPC named "Newport Guardsman", but that raises the issue of ruining the gameplay experience of new players because some character wants to farm ingredients at the North Newport gates. Offering Fame Points to whoever comes up with a great AND ELEGANT solution to this problem for which I've already dedicated a portion of my brainpower.
(5) I have no intention of resetting players' Baking skills to zero or lowering them by 25% like we did with the Fletching revamp or anything like that. There was good reason for doing that in the Fletching revamp, but there's no reason for it with the Baking revamp.
(6) I haven't decided how the foods bought with Thurgadin Bounty Tokens and Fame Points will be handled. The obvious options are to either ignore them, remove them, or to include them as ingredients in recipes. In keeping with the whimsical nature of the tradeskill, I'm up for hearing opinions on those, and if you've got a clever idea that isn't one of those 3 obvious options, I'd love to hear that, too.
(7) I'm not sure yet if we can rename the tradeskill to "Cooking". I want to, but if there's some place even as remote as the Wizard Trainer skill list still saying "Baking" instead of "Cooking", then the skill rename is not okay despite making sense.
Edited to add:
(8) The concern of bank space due to having possibly 50 slots taken up by "Gnome-shaped Cookie Cutter" and "Barbarian-shaped Cookie Cutter" and "Wok" and "Cooking Pot" and "Muffin Tins" and "Fish Boning Knife" is one that I'm mostly turning a deaf ear to. If you want to packrat hoard every possible reuseable cooking item, then make a new character to serve as a bank mule and store them on that character or something. Those types of things shouldn't be [NO DROP], so you shouldn't have to keep them on your main character at all times.
