This Pretty Much Nails It...

[The Magistrate]

[niyad]

1. If you say so. I have been ignoring the rules for decades.

[The Magistrate]

2. I Do Not Bake, Ma'am

[woodsprite]

3. So I'm officially a cook, not a baker! nt

[calimary]

13. And I'm more of a baker than a cook.

A good chocolate cake demands careful ingredient measurement.

[haydukelives]

4. Yep

[LudwigPastorius]

5. Republican baking science:

Check with God first if it's a cake for a gay wedding.

[Rhiannon12866]

6. Same here!

I'm a cook, but not a baker... My Polish grandmother and my mother could bake very well, but nobody bothered to teach me.

[fantase56]

7. cooking has recipes,

baking has formulas.....

[AndyS]

8. If you bake, follow the recipe.

If you cook, follow your heart.

[dchill]

9. Successful baking leaves very little room for improv.

That's why my cooking is much better than my baking. I have screwed up box cakes.

[unblock]

10. Top one is ratio of flour to butter, whether cooking or baking

Bottom one is proportion of everything else

[intrepidity]

11. So.True.nt

[Faux pas]

12. Lol

That's why I don't bake, no matter how precise I was it never worked out.

[Warpy]

14. I've been doing some seat of the pants baking

because I can't fucking find anything and probably coulldn't see to measure it if I could.

It's come out fine.

I haven't attempted any scratch cakes and I don't think I will.

Everything else has done OK.

[hippywife]

15. I don't always measure when baking, either.

It just depends on what I'm making. After more than 50 years of both, I sometimes just measure ingredients in the palm of my hand by sight.

I always get a kick out of the people who insist you need to carefully weigh, not just measure, your ingredients, then at the same time express how they wish they could be like their grandmother who never measured anything.

[central scrutinizer]

16. Americans cook even when using recipes

Because our cookbooks give recipes by volumes (cups, teaspoons, etc,) and there is a lot of variation in dry ingredients. Some cookbooks try to standardize things by requiring ingredients like flour be sifted before measuring. So much easier to use a kitchen scale and a recipe that gives quantities by weight.