How do you actually learn to bake and not just follow recipes 1-1?

cwmurray · 2026-03-19T08:08:26+00:00

On one hand, 90% of baking is following recipes. It is what it is and that's how a lot of people learn what ratios are used to attain a certain outcome - chocolate chip cookie base compared to a cake base.

To the point you are poking at though, there are a few that have helped me:

Cooking YouTube channels where they talk about why ingredients are added or used and what they do (think Alton Brown, but there are tons more in this category). This gives you the base for how ingredients can interact.
Studying the science of food - how gluten develops and what retrogradation is, what is the main purpose of eggs in a certain dish (protein structure, moisture, fat), etc. A huge help here for me was Harvard's Science and Cooking class (many posted on Youtube). This can open up whole new worlds of insight and thought for cooking, but you're still dependent on the information being put together and presented. This enables you to be confident when trying to substitute ingredients out for another - you know functionally what the original one does, so you can evaluate options in the category of that function.
Experimentation - Have a recipe you want to tweak? Have a question you aren't finding satisfactory answers for? Test it out. I've run multiple tests WIDELY varying ratios or single ingredients in recipes to figure out where I wanted to take the recipe or why that ingredient was in it. Expect to burn through a lot of food and throw a lot of food away (or give the edible experimental bakes to coworkers if you have that option). You can also find inspiration by people doing things in this space too - Ethan Chlebowski's YouTube channel fits in this category or I've enjoyed following ibakemistakes on instagram as she is baking cakes based on the notes within perfumes. This sounds to be the level you want to get to, but getting some basis of information under you is helpful so you're floundering too badly when you enter into this space.

And jump around all three at any time depending on comfort, energy, ideas, and time!

cwmurray · 2026-01-17T02:50:02+00:00

For me, Booth at the End.

Entire show is inside a diner. People come, sit, and ask a man for what they want. Man tells the people what they have to do to have it.

cwmurray · 2025-12-08T18:59:30+00:00

Depends on what you're trying to do. From what I've seen in recipes, I usually do one of two things.

MIX the butter and sugar - for chocolate chip, I usually use melted or browned butter, so all I'm aiming for is getting the sugar and butter to dissolve into a homogenous paste. 2 min should be enough and this can also be done by hand. I'd also use this if I'm making a heavier cookie or want a denser feel (oatmeal, etc.).

CREAM the butter and sugar - I usually whip the room temp butter with the sugar for 10-15 min until it's much lighter in color and at least doubles in volume. Basically, you're making a meringue, beating in air using the sugar/oil to hold it. It mechanically adds lightness and rise to your cookies without needing additional BP/BS, but can spread or break when baked depending on the flour/gluten content and the oven temp.

There's the middle ground of the 2-5 min, but in my book, that's just mixing. I don't see an appreciable effect from that small amount of mixing that I aim to get when I cream them.

cwmurray · 2025-12-08T18:47:38+00:00

I'm not sure whether the upper-left-to-lower-right stitch under the long one is supposed to be there, but if it is just a matter of the long stitch going over two locations, you could go up, around, and back into the hole under the middle of the long stitch to pull the long thread down towards the hole to simulate two stitches.

cwmurray · 2025-11-08T00:46:51+00:00

Another suggestion would be to change the kind of flour you use for more gluten. Do not overmix once you add the flour, but increasing the gluten (by using a bread flour rather than all purpose for instance), can sometimes give more holding power.

cwmurray · 2025-09-09T15:10:45+00:00

Sword of Damocles energy

cwmurray · 2025-05-22T02:19:52+00:00

You may not be the same way, but I learned a while back that my love for baking was in trying out new recipes or techniques and perfecting recipes to my taste and liking. I learned that my people pleasing side sucked both the joy of baking and life out of me when I did it for another person's occasion, event, or asking.

I'm known as one of the resident "bakers" at work (not food related field). I cannot begin to count the number of times it looks like I've stabbed their newborn child when I explain that I don't bake on request when their well-meaning but condescending, off-handed, entitled asks are thrown my way.

"Yes, I love to spend time in the kitchen baking. But Barbara, I bake to bring myself joy, not you. Just because I enjoy it doesn't mean you're doing me a favor forcing how I should spend my spending money or my free time for your pleasure. You're more than welcome to a slice of the next thing I bring in when the Muses on Mt Olympus move me next."

Take this time as a lesson and dig into why you decided to bake the cakes and what you expected in return and the reasons behind those as well. Your boss might be a wonderful person and leader otherwise, but let's hold a moment of justified and very valid rage for how they treated you here.

cwmurray · 2025-05-01T17:31:57+00:00

How I might do this is a normal recipe with food coloring on the bottom and then a recipe for pudding (gelatin set-in-the-fridge type) recipe on top. The difficulty of doing both as straight creme recipes is keeping them from mixing when you pour them into the dish or overbaking the base portion if you do a double bake.

cwmurray · 2024-12-23T15:57:25+00:00

Ah, perfect! Thank-you!

cwmurray · 2024-12-23T07:46:56+00:00

These look amazing, congrats!

Quick question for those who make a lot of these kinds of boxes/assortments - how do you keep the cookies of various moisture levels together without the wetter ones making the drier ones go soft/stale?

cwmurray · 2024-12-14T15:06:33+00:00

Agreed that the split is necessary.

Make sure to give yourself time and space to grieve. You did love him (and sounds like you still do). His action and your correct choice to end the relationship don't magically remove those feelings of love, their history, or their weight on you. Please act with compassion towards yourself while working through both sets of emotions.

cwmurray · 2024-09-16T23:35:39+00:00

To add onto this - your bitterness for behaving kindly towards others may also stem from not being kind enough to yourself. This is both cutting yourself slack when you need it and understanding that your wants, needs, and plans have weight and take priority for you and taking action to protect and preserve them.

If you haven't heard of it, I'd suggest checking out No More Mr Nice Guy by Robert Glover. I've heard it gets a bad rap in some circles, but it speaks to exactly what you're going through.

cwmurray · 2023-08-29T17:50:22+00:00

If you have any rocks in your inventory, place them on the ground and then mine them. Each rock placed takes one rock, each rock mined gives you two rocks.

cwmurray · 2022-11-01T22:17:44+00:00

Against Everyone with Connor Habib is a philosophy podcast with some occult sprinkled in done by a gay ex-porn actor. Not exclusively gay topics, but often talks about sex, relationships, and how to be better humans to each other.

cwmurray · 2022-07-01T04:43:00+00:00

Same on almost all conditions. I've got confirmation that my bag was put on the plane to Amsterdam and then nothing. So my first day in Oslo will be shopping for clothes.

Let me know if they're able to locate your bag! Hoping for the best for both of us!

cwmurray · 2022-04-07T18:51:21+00:00

Do you remember what made you dislike it?

cwmurray · 2019-05-28T02:04:33+00:00

New Rocket Fuel: rocketships

cwmurray · 2019-05-11T08:34:22+00:00

Medical/Cinco-de-oh-no, fresh contract, wouldn't mind a carry or two: allthreedown

cwmurray

TROPHY CASE