memes

Once you understand the building blocks, baking is pretty accommodating of improvisation. It's just the time delay between the step you take (before baking) and the consequences of that variation being apparent (after baking) makes it harder to iterate as you learn, without good memory/record keeping of what makes things different.

And baking has a ton of ingredients doing multiple jobs. Sugar is a sweetener, yes, but it also softens up the finished product, retains moisture, promotes browning, and changes yeast behavior. Understanding that each lever might do multiple things makes it a little bit more restricted on improvising, but there are still quite a few things you can do along different dimensions.

But if you take a chocolate chip cookie recipe and run through a bunch of variations, you'll slowly internalize the effects of the different options, and will start to see and understand how each step looks within that variation. Yeah, a scale makes precise ratios easier, but plenty of bakers have learned how to make bread or cookies or cake through look and feel, without precise measurements, by just reading the feedback from the dough or batter or other intermediate steps.

In other words, it's a bit more work to get there but once you're there you can wing it with baking too.

“Baking is science for hungry people”

I’m not huge on baking. Had to swap out some milk in a savoury carrot cake recipe and was fully expecting the whole thing to implode.

With cooking: eh, I have one of the three main ingredients, I’ll semi-randomly swap the rest, great result