Cooks who improvise confidently on the hob often fail at baking, and the reason is structural rather than a matter of skill. Baking removes the feedback loop.
Tasting is unavailable at the point of decision
Savoury cooking is a sequence of small corrections, with the cook tasting, adjusting and tasting again until the dish is right.
A cake batter cannot be usefully tasted for how the finished cake will behave, since almost every quality that matters emerges during baking.
Every decision is therefore made in advance and cannot be revised, which turns cooking from a conversation into a single submitted answer.
Ratios are doing structural work
Flour, liquid, fat, sugar and egg exist in proportions that determine whether a structure forms and holds, not merely how the result tastes.
Shifting one of them changes the network the others were building, so an extra spoonful of flour is not a small increase in flouriness but a different structure.
Savoury dishes rarely depend on ratio this way, which is why a heavier hand with an ingredient there produces a variation rather than a failure.
Chemical leavening runs on a timer
Raising agents begin producing gas as soon as they meet liquid, and some produce a second burst on heating.
A batter left standing after mixing loses part of that first release to the air, so the same recipe rises less if the oven was not ready.
This is why baking instructions are unusually strict about sequence, and why preparing the tin and the oven before mixing is advice with a mechanism behind it.
Measurement by volume introduces real error
Flour packs to very different densities depending on how it is scooped, and the same cup can hold noticeably different amounts on two attempts.
In a stew that variation disappears into the pot, whereas in a cake it changes the ratio that the structure depends on.
Weighing removes the largest single source of inconsistency, which is why bakers who switch to scales find their results stabilise without changing anything else.
Ovens differ more than recipes admit
Domestic ovens vary from their stated temperature, cycle around a set point, and heat unevenly depending on where the element sits.
A recipe written for one oven therefore arrives at another as an approximation, and the stated time is a starting estimate rather than an instruction.
Learning a particular oven, through a thermometer and through paying attention to where things brown fastest, resolves more baking problems than changing recipes does.