There is a gap between a dish you can cook and a recipe someone else can cook. Closing it is a craft of its own, and most of it happens after the cooking is finished.
Weigh everything, including the liquids
Cups measure volume, and volume varies with how you scooped. A cup of flour can differ by a third depending on whether it was spooned in or packed down, which is enough to change a cake. Grams do not have opinions.
Weigh the liquids too, into the same bowl, and you remove a jug from the washing up. If your readers expect cups or ounces, convert at the end from the gram figures you actually tested. Never the other way round.
Change one thing at a time
Three tests minimum, one variable per test. If you drop the sugar, raise the oven and change the tin in the same bake, you have learned nothing except that this version is different.
Write the variable down before you cook, not after. The point of a test is the comparison, and comparisons need a record. Date every version, note what changed, note what happened, and keep the failures: knowing that 200g of butter is too much is half of knowing that 170g is right.
Bakers work in percentages, and so should you
For anything dough-based, express every ingredient as a percentage of the flour weight. The recipe then scales to any quantity, and two recipes become comparable at a glance. A 70% hydration dough is a fact about the dough; "350ml of water" is a fact about one batch.
Write down what is invisible to you
The author knows their own kitchen so well that they stop seeing it. The reader has none of that.
- Tin size and material. A 20cm tin and a 23cm tin are different recipes. Cast iron and thin nonstick are different recipes.
- Fan or conventional. Give both, or say which one and by how much to adjust.
- Yield, precisely. "Serves four" from someone who eats like a bird is a disappointment. Give a count and a weight where you can: twelve biscuits, about 40g each.
- Total time and hands-on time, separately. A reader deciding at six o'clock needs to know the difference.
- What can be done ahead, and how it keeps. Most people want this before they start, so put it near the top rather than in a footnote.
Define doneness by the senses, not the clock
Times are estimates about your oven. Signals are instructions anyone can follow. "Twenty-five minutes" becomes "25 to 30 minutes, until the edges are set and the centre still wobbles when you nudge the tin". Onions are not "cooked for five minutes"; they are "soft and translucent with no colour, about eight minutes".
Give a temperature wherever one exists. Internal temperature for meat and bread turns the hardest judgement in a recipe into a number.
Structure the words the way the cook moves
List ingredients in the order they are used, grouped by component when there is a sauce or a topping. Put the action first in each step so the eye catches it: "Fry the onions in the oil until soft", not "Take the oil you measured earlier and add it to the pan".
One action per sentence, mostly. Keep a step to a single stretch of attention: everything that happens while the pan is hot belongs together, and anything twenty minutes later is a new step.
Give it to someone else, then be quiet
This is the test that matters and the one most often skipped. Hand the written recipe to someone who has not seen the dish, and do not answer questions. Watch where they hesitate, what they reread, which ingredient they cannot find in the list, where they ask "how small is small".
Every hesitation is a sentence you need to rewrite. If two testers stall in the same place, it is not the testers.
Notes go at the end
Substitutions, variations, why the method works, what to do with the leftover egg white: all useful, all after the recipe. Nobody standing at a hob wants to scroll past four paragraphs of context to find out how much salt.
The story, if there is one, goes before the ingredients or after the notes. Not in the middle of the cooking.
Keep the log
A working recipe file holds the version history, not just the final text: what you tried, what it did, and the one line explaining why the current version is the current version. A year later, when you want to halve it, scale it or turn it into something else, that file is worth more than the recipe.