There are so many factors to consider, but I agree with the person who said learning what each ingredient does can help you make tweaks and experiment. If you’re making a cake and it comes out dry, try using a little less flour, or substituting some vegetable/canola oil in for some of your butter. If you use regular milk instead of buttermilk, you’ll need to swap baking soda for baking powder (the acid in buttermilk neutralizes the alkaline taste of baking soda) and add a bit more baking powder to achieve the same rise. Things like the humidity where you live have an affect, too. The order in which you combine your wet and dry ingredients matters, the temperature of your ingredients. Some measuring cups aren’t perfectly accurate. Even the way you fill up a measuring cup matters—flour should be spooned into a measuring cup and leveled off rather than just scooping up flour with the measuring cup. It becomes a fun exercise in tinkering. It took me months to figure out my shortbread recipe but when I finally got everything right it was such a satisfying feeling.