For me, baking is more forgiving than cooking. I’m good at cooking (I think), but getting just the right texture and taste is difficult. The worst for me is meat. Cook it for too little and it’s raw and potentialy unsafe, but cook it for too long and you get a shoe sole. The time window is narrow and you have to account for the time the meat will cook after you take it of the heat.
On the other hand in baking I can usually add 10min if I’m not sure or poke it with a skewer to check if it’s done. Making batter/dough is more precise, but I wouldn’t say it’s super precise. Most of the time I get away with eyeballing baking powder or yeasts. Also flour and sugar often have something like 20g tolerance so it’s not terrible (I prefer using scale so I might be biased), and going beyond that can still give you a good result e.g. few years ago I doubled the sugar in my challah recipe (50g to 100g) and it made it much softer with no downsides. You can’t fix taste after you baked the cake but on the other hand the are less variables when it comes to adding flavoring, so it’s easier to learn doing it right on first try (It’s hard to fuck up adding vanilla extract).
I was watching MasterChef and Ramsey shouted “if it’s not finished cooking, turn up the heat!” and I have used that line thousands of times since then, but I tried it with a braided puff pastry and fucking ruined it.
For me, baking is more forgiving than cooking. I’m good at cooking (I think), but getting just the right texture and taste is difficult. The worst for me is meat. Cook it for too little and it’s raw and potentialy unsafe, but cook it for too long and you get a shoe sole. The time window is narrow and you have to account for the time the meat will cook after you take it of the heat. On the other hand in baking I can usually add 10min if I’m not sure or poke it with a skewer to check if it’s done. Making batter/dough is more precise, but I wouldn’t say it’s super precise. Most of the time I get away with eyeballing baking powder or yeasts. Also flour and sugar often have something like 20g tolerance so it’s not terrible (I prefer using scale so I might be biased), and going beyond that can still give you a good result e.g. few years ago I doubled the sugar in my challah recipe (50g to 100g) and it made it much softer with no downsides. You can’t fix taste after you baked the cake but on the other hand the are less variables when it comes to adding flavoring, so it’s easier to learn doing it right on first try (It’s hard to fuck up adding vanilla extract).
I was watching MasterChef and Ramsey shouted “if it’s not finished cooking, turn up the heat!” and I have used that line thousands of times since then, but I tried it with a braided puff pastry and fucking ruined it.