LOL..how old are you?

The reason I asked your age is because I used to be a terrible, terrible cook. I would say all the way to my late 20's or early 30's. But I kept on trying. I am now a pretty amazing cook.

However...I do still have issues with cooking bread too!!!!

I have this problem too. I discovered it isn't me (or least not ALL me). Our oven is crap. I've figured out that I need to bake things at least 25 degrees lower than what is normal & I need to set the timer at least 5 minutes shorter than what is normal & just watch for things to finish baking from there.

I have to turn whatever I'm baking halfway through & keep it as far left as I can in the oven because the back & the right side get hotter than the front & left.

Your oven may run hot. (It MAY be you, but blame it on the oven.)

It comes with practice... I learned to cook completely on my own and I'm not going to lie youtube was a HUGE help in that... when I first started to cook there were a lot of terms in the recipes that I didn't even know how to do it... for example "pound meet to 1/4 inch" the first time I saw that I remember being like WTF? Youtube! Saute vs. bake vs. fry. etc. I didn't know the difference between most of the cooking terms... once you have those down do what a previous poster said and figure out your oven and your bakeware... also, what the first comment said about ingredients is dead on!

I'm the chef of the family (following after my mom) and everyone always wants to come over for dinner... but I can't bake for the life of me, unless it's like Betty Crocker or something. DH thinks it's because baking is an exact science while cooking you have a lot of artistic license.

So what I do is the base, I never do from scratch, I'm bound to mess it up, but everything else I can play with. Like banana bread. I use the mix, add more bananas than would be usual, walnuts, raisins, chocolate chip, and everyone thinks I went through so much trouble to make it.

Or biscuits. Hello Bisquick! Extra butter, sour cream (trust me, it makes a difference), milk, oregano flakes, cracked pepper, and shredded cheddar cheese. People scarf these things down and always think I went the extra mile to make them and think it's my own secret recipe.

So yeah, I gave up trying to bake from scratch. Just not good at it. Much like I can't keep plants alive for some reason. I've even accidentally melted a cactus before.

I might think about getting a bread machine though...

biscuits: they're done before they look done.

When I married H, I'd never made biscuits except out of a can, but it stuck in my *hmhmhmph* that he would RAVE about how awesome MIL's biscuits were, so I decided that I *would* learn to make biscuits. My first *several* attempts were questionable at best, and none were edible. I also tried several different recipes and settle to tweaking the one that turned out the best to begin with.

I still can't make pie crust.

My pizza dough is edible, but not yummy.

But, by damn it, I can make biscuits.

Oh, and I got to, after I'd spent so much time/effort learning to make biscuits, taste MIL's biscuits once. Gross! I mean, seriously, they were horrible. When I asked H about it, "I just wanted home made biscuits." Well played, sir; well played.