Baking?

I was talking to Matthew the other night about cooking. He had just made broccoli cheddar soup and I asked whether he used a recipe or just made the soup using what he knew in his head. He said that he just made it up. Matt said that he already knew how to do the soup base and so he just added the other ingredients as he went along. "I know cooking like you know baking," he told me. But that just made me re-think things because Matthew knows how to make soup just like that, no recipe. Every time I bake, though, I have to use a recipe. In spite of baking for the last eleven years of my life, I still have to use a recipe every time I bake something. Does this mean that to really know how to cook and bake, someone should know how to do it instead of just using a recipe? And if that's the case, then does that mean that I don't really know how to bake? Inconsequential question, I know, but it made me start to doubt myself a little...