pet theory:
Buck is a really good cook, but a mediocre baker.
This makes a ton of sense to me for several reasons: – Bobby teaches him to COOK. I'm betting Bobby is a competent baker as well, but iirc what we actually see Bobby teach Buck (or hear about him teaching Buck) is cooking: breakfast, lasagna, chili, etc. Cooking is what you do if you're making a big meal for a bunch of hungry firefighters.
– Cooking is honestly a very flexible, intuitive skill. It allows for a lot of creativity, but also a lot of laziness, experimentation, substitution, and intuition. This is why I love cooking, and I feel like Buck would be the same: he strikes me as someone who likes to go "okay, here's a fridge full of ingredients, what can I do with it?" and then just kind of play around. We do see him playing around with recipes, and sometimes those experiments go awry (like the lasagna,) but he's still considered a good cook by Bobby, which I think means he is in general good at putting ingredients together. – Baking is not like that. Baking requires you to either 1) follow recipes fairly precisely, or 2) understand chemistry, or 3) have baked enough things that you get a reliable sense of what happens if you do X or sub Y. I am a competent baker, but I follow recipes for baking where I mostly don't follow recipes for cooking, and when I fuck a recipe up, it's because I decide to follow a whim and try something, and because I'm abandoning 1) and don't have 2), it means I'm basically rolling the dice on the baked good working out. Buck bakes a LOT, so I think he's probably banking on 3) being a skill he's developing actively, but he's trying to treat baking like cooking, following whims and instincts and creative urges that don't consistently turn out the way he wants, because he's neither following recipes nor acting the way someone who really understands the chemistry of cooking would act. Evidence: chocolate chip protein cookies. The bad scones. Maddie lying about the cookie. "This is actually good, Buck!"
– This to me explains why people are happy to eat Buck's meals at the firehouse but try his baked goods with more caution/act surprised when the baked goods are good—he probably has more flops in the mix than he does while cooking.
– Buck's love of lists and clipboards and "perfect" recipes btw also feels to me like a coping mechanism for someone who isn't perfectly organized internally, and who gets satisfaction from organizing things within his own personal schema—like, it's harder for him to make himself understand and internalize a written explanation of how the chemistry of baking works than it would be for him to just try it out and see how it goes, then record his own results. Which would go a long way towards Buck not knowing that cream of tartar is a key ingredient in snickerdoodles—he's trying to reinvent the wheel every time.* Evidence: Ravi's crack about Buck trying out every spice in the kitchen consecutively honestly seemed not that far off to me from something he would try!! (*As someone who finds actual spreadsheets hard to smoothly understand and therefore would rather make my own stupid little tables in google docs even though I am WELL AWARE that it's harder and can do fewer things...I understand the satisfaction of doing something unnecessarily difficult because it makes sense to your brain.)
– I just think Buck throwing himself into baking but not looking up anything about how to bake feels like the guy I know! He IS a rabbit-hole guy, but really inconsistently—he research spirals over Billy Boils, but he doesn't look up the Kinsey scale. He wants to be a good baker, but he wants to figure out how to do it himself (or through Bobby, but in a weird way I think that's the same thing. Everything he does in the kitchen is Buck trying to be like Bobby.)
