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Joined 17 days ago
cake
Cake day: July 31st, 2026

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  • They just haven’t practiced it. If you’re a good cook, you absolutely have capacity to be a good baker, because they’re only semantically different things. If we called it cooking a cake, no one would draw this distinction, and some other languages/cultures don’t.

    If you can prepare, mix, and properly cook ingredients then you can prepare, mix, and properly bake ingredients.


  • I would argue that even measuring by weight isn’t all that important.

    You would be wrong due to the physical properties of flour and how it compresses, but we generally agree that most people who are getting fine results with measuring however they want should just keep doing whatever they want.


  • At 3AM ain’t nobody got time or the mood to scale everything.

    I mean, when I was a professional baker I did exactly that, and so did everyone I worked with. I think it’s more convenient and faster than measuring by volume, so it’s what I’d usually prefer to do at home or at work.


  • What recipe where you’re cooking can you change ingredients by such extreme amounts? Pasta bolognese or lasagne with 2x as much meat and a quarter as much pasta would be all wrong. Do you put 2x as much oil in a sauce and expect it to go well? When you make a roux, don’t you have to like. Balance the amount of butter with the amount of flour?

    When you cook rice, do you experiment with different amounts of water? Or do you just cook it until it’s cooked?

    In general, though, yes, stylistic decisions like how much egg vs. flour is how you make different types of cake. There’s not one platonic ideal of cake because baking isn’t as precise as advertised.