What in the wide tarnation is better on a winter’s day than the smell of something sweet baking in your oven? OK, world peace, I suppose.

Oh, and justice. Justice for everyone. Justice and world peace are better than nice smells, then, but, seriously, that’s about it.

Let’s spend a little time talking a bit about baking, then. Namely, why it’s so easy to screw it up and what are some steps we can take to give ourselves a fighting chance.

Why you need

to learn this

Baking’s not like savory cookery, where you can fix stuff as you go along. “Taste. Analyze. Adjust. Taste.” That’s what we tell our culinary students over at Kendall College. But with baking and pastry, there’s none of that. Once it goes into the oven, there’s no turning back.

The steps you take

Today’s column is a little different. Instead of walking you through the steps of how to make something delicious, we’re going to talk about a few of the common pitfalls that can turn an otherwise delicious treat into a sack full of nasty.

First, though, full disclosure: I’m not a baker.

Compared with my awesome colleagues in Kendall’s Baking and Pastry Department, there’ve been times in the bake shop when I’ve felt like a duck with a Rubik’s Cube. And that’s precisely why I’m exactly the guy to talk about some common mistakes because I’ve made them all.

Here we go, then:

Read the recipe: This seems obvious, but in baking, everything is done for a purpose, and everything should be done exactly as it says. For example, bakers use several different mixing methods to combine ingredients, each of which has a different purpose and gives a different end result. Chocolate chip cookies, for example, are made with the “creaming method,” where the sugar and butter are whipped together to form a light emulsion into which the eggs are added slowly. If you just try to mix everything together, the emulsion won’t hold, and your labors will be for naught. Read the recipe through (twice) before you start, then follow it as you would directions out of hell.

Ingredients: Next, as long as you’re reading the recipe in advance, make sure you’re using the ingredients it calls for. Every ingredient in baking has a specific function, and if you start making substitutions, you might lose some of that function. If a recipe calls for milk, for example, it means whole milk, not skim or 2 percent. Less fat can result in a drier product. And when a recipe calls for an egg, it means a large egg. Not medium, not jumbo. Large. Since they are primarily water, having the wrong size egg can result in the wrong amount of liquid, which can then screw up your final product. As a rule of thumb, anytime you ask, “Is Ingredient X the same as Ingredient Y,” assume the answer is a resounding “No!” As in, “No, don’t substitute baking soda for baking powder.” Or, “No, don’t substitute bread flour for cake flour.” Or, “No, don’t substitute spitting cobra venom for 60 percent chocolate chips.” It’s not the same.

Sifting: This is often considered one of the more butt-painy kitchen tasks. The flour gets everywhere and the dog looks as if it’s working undercover at a drug cartel. Sifting your dry ingredients is important, though. First, it removes little lumps of things we don’t want lumps of, like hardened sugar or baking soda. Also, sifting aerates the ingredients and helps them to combine evenly, giving you a better final product. If you don’t have a sifter, you can achieve the mixing and aeration simply by whisking. That won’t get rid of any clumps of craziness, but it’ll help distribute the ingredients evenly.

Scaling, aka measuring: Mis-scaling is probably the easiest mistake to make and can result in vastly different outcomes. Adding a tablespoon of baking powder, for example, when the recipe calls for a teaspoon, is not only going to screw up the texture of your cupcakes, it’s going to give them that nasty, chemically flavor that makes them taste like something robots eat. If you really want to get crazy, get yourself a good quality kitchen scale, and only work with recipes that use weight. Weight is a much more accurate representation of reality than volume. That’s why your box of Toasted Krunchy O’s says, “The contents of this box are sold by weight and not by volume. Some settling may have occurred during shipping.” And that’s also why, when you open it up, the box looks only a third full.

Oven temperature: How far can you throw your oven? Coincidentally, that’s about as far as you should trust the accuracy of its thermostat. Get yourself a sturdy oven thermometer, and replace it every year. If you set your oven for 350 and the thermometer reads 325, then you know to crank the heat a little.

Practice: Remember, this stuff is hard. And like everything else, the more you do it, the better you’ll get. The more you make a recipe, the more you’ll understand what’s going on, and you’ll begin to see how it all comes together. And that will give you better and more satisfying results. Dig?

James P. DeWan is a culinary instructor at Kendall College in Chicago.