There are so many reasons to cook and bake. Yes, good food is certainly one of them, but so is the sense of satisfaction you get when you make something with your own hands, when you know that you can take care of yourself and feed yourself well and when you know that you can take care of and feed others.

You can use melted butter instead of oil, but your cake may be a little denser.

Anything you make in a 'normal' sized loaf pan can be made in the longer pan - you just have to increase the recipe proportionately.

Sometimes I think there are devils at work in the kitchen - recipes that are always perfect sometimes come out less than perfect and I can't figure out why.

When I'm developing a recipe with brown butter - I know how much butter I want in the end and I so I start with more butter than I'll need.

Adam Roberts is an original: smart, funny, talented, endlessly inquisitive, an A student and, happily for us, an A+ teacher. Everyone from beginner cooks to sure hands will learn something new on each page. And even if, like Adam's mom's, your stove stores shoes and handbags, you'll still be charmed by Secrets-it's a great read.

Whenever you brown butter, some of it is lost - water evaporates, milk solids fall to the bottom of the pan, that kind of thing. It's possible that in browning the butter you ended up making the dough with too little butter.