Taking Liberties With Recipes

Improvising can be very tricky when you have a recipe card in front off you. This is especially true when you're making a recipe for the first time -- when adding or subtracting an ingredient can make or break the final product.

I was reminded me of this when I recently made a batch of cherry muffins using dried tart cherries. I had some leftover sour cream in my fridge so I decided to merge two different muffin recipes -- one used sour cream, but the other did not. Although the recipe didn't turn out disastrously, the muffins tasted a lot more like sponge cake than like the normal texture of a muffin.

I think people like me are often tempted to tweak an existing recipe partly because it will somehow make the recipe a little more"mine."