When Patti Murray attended her first meeting of The Bakers Dozen, a Bay Area-based group of baking enthusiasts, she wondered why she recognized so many people.

A former professional photographer, she has a good eye and knew she'd seen them before. Then she realized: "I knew all of these people because I'd seen their pictures on the jackets of their cookbooks."

They were her heroes: Marion Cunningham (a James Beard protege who revised the classic "Fannie Farmer Cookbook"), Flo Braker ("The Simple Art of Perfect Baking"), bakery owner Amy Pressman, Lindsey Shere (Chez Panisse), Carol Field ("The Italian Baker") and other stellar names in the world of baking. Cunningham had co-founded the group with Pressman in 1989.

Murray, a Lanikai-born cook and caterer who considers herself a tiny cookie in the big world of people who've mastered the exacting science of baking, said on a recent Isle visit that all she could do was marvel that she was actually in a room with these people.

And that, furthermore, they weren't full of themselves. They were full of knowledge and eager to share it, even with nonprofessionals.

She would love to see a Bakers Dozen group start up in Hawai'i, she said. "It's simple. The meetings are very casual. We meet in a room at a restaurant. We choose a topic, a lot of the time we bake and taste, we share the latest thing we're excited about. There are no egos and we don't make it complicated," said Murray.

The group, which has spread to three cities, began, she explains, when Cunningham would occasionally visit the Bay Area and hang out with her friend Pressman and the two would share tips and techniques, discuss problems and baking disasters. They got the idea that maybe other bakers would like to do that, too. "They thought, 'Why keep all this to ourselves?' " Murray said.

The first meeting of The Bakers Dozen was a meringue marathon: 40 bakers, professional and not, showed up, each with a lemon meringue pie, and then they spent a couple of hours talking about tricky meringue, why it weeps and cracks and does all the things this seemingly simple recipe does to drive us crazy.

You have to be a baker to know how cool that must have been.

Murray, who lives in Redwood City, Calif., and works for a catering company that operates dining rooms for biotech and software businesses there, said joining the Bakers Dozen was a godsend.

She never planned to be a cook: Her background was in mediation, working for nonprofit organizations and such. But she was laid off and lucky enough to get basic culinary training through an employment development program after which she became the second assistant from the left in a restaurant.

One of her jobs was to fill in for the pastry chef on that woman's day off; all Murray had to do was bake popovers and plate the desserts the pastry chef had made the day before.

But then the baker got fired. All of a sudden, Murray was "it."

There were some recipes for the standard items and she found a copy of Braker's baking book (Braker has a new one coming out soon that she's been working on for years).

And she faked it.

One day, she met Braker at a restaurant convention and her heroine invited Murray to come to the next Bakers Dozen meeting. "I thought it was just was conference talk and never expected to hear from her again ... and then the invitation came," Murray recalled.

Today, Murray is as full of tips on baking as any professional, and as generous with her information as those original members of the Dozen (who, by the way, published a highly respected reference guide, "The Baker's Dozen Cookbook: Become a Better Baker With 135 Foolproof Recipes and Tried-and-True Techniques; William Murray, 2001).

Here are five baking tips from Murray:

1. Buy the best ingredients you can afford and learn their properties.

2. Leave eggs in the carton; don't transfer them to the refrigerator door. The door area is too warm and shortens the shelf life of the eggs.

3. Weigh, don't measure, ingredients because they can vary in weight depending on many factors. Invest in a kitchen scale and use it.

4. Use unsalted butter; this allows you to control the salt content of the recipe. There can be as much as 2 1/2 teaspoons of salt in a quarter-pound of salted butter, depending on the brand and formulation, she said.

5. Have the right tools for the job. Besides a kitchen scale, have proper measuring spoons, the correct pan sizes and so on. And the classic stuff is the best; though many of us became enamored of silicon a few years back, it just doesn't work for all baking. Silicon candy forms work well, but silicon baking pans won't give you the right results for cakes, she said. In fact, Murray doesn't use cake pans; she bakes her cakes in rimmed jelly roll sheets and then cuts them into the desired shape.

And these she threw in for free: Don't over-mix, especially egg whites for meringue; you'll get too much air in the mixture and it won't be able to support the other ingredients. Don't "overcream" cake or cookie dough; the result will be a crumbly and dry confection.

And resist the temptation to change a recipe until you've made it once exactly as written; you have to know a recipe well in order to alter it successfully.

"Baking is really chemistry combined with artistry," said Murray. "It is much more demanding than cooking. You have to be critically precise, for example, about the ratio of fat to flour. I know chefs that won't bake; it just doesn't give them enough leeway. And I know bakers who find cooking boring."

Not Murray.