⚖️ Measuring for Baking

Why baking needs more care

A stew forgives an extra handful of anything. A cake doesn't: flour, fat, sugar, eggs and leavener work as a set of ratios, and if one drifts the texture changes. Too much flour is the most common problem, and it gives dry cookies, dense cakes and stiff dough.

A kitchen scale fixes most of it. A gram of flour is a gram however you scoop it, while a cup of flour can vary a lot from one person to the next. Weighing is also faster: put the bowl on the scale, press tare (zero), add the first ingredient, tare again, add the next.

Measuring flour with cups

No scale? Then how you fill the cup matters more than anything else.

1. Stir the flour in the bag or canister to loosen it.
2. Spoon it into a dry measuring cup until it's heaped over the top. Don't shake or tap the cup.
3. Sweep the excess off with the back of a knife.

Dipping the cup into the bag and scooping packs the flour down, so you get noticeably more of it than the recipe means. That's the usual reason a recipe comes out dry or tough the first time.

Everything else

• Brown sugar is packed: press it into the cup firmly enough that it holds the cup's shape when you tip it out.
• Liquids go in a clear liquid measuring cup on the counter. Read it at eye level, not from above.
• Sticky things like honey, molasses and peanut butter slide out of a cup or spoon you've wiped with a little oil.
• Spoons are level unless the recipe says heaping: fill, then sweep flat.
• Butter sticks in the US are marked in tablespoons: one stick is ½ cup, 8 Tbsp or 113 g.

Cups to grams

Weights for one level US cup (237 ml), measured the way described above. The recipes' metric amounts agree with these to within a few percent, so a recipe comes out the same whether you follow it in cups or in grams.

Small amounts

A household scale that reads in 1 g steps can't weigh half a teaspoon of baking soda accurately, so for small amounts spoons are often the better tool. Approximate weights of one level teaspoon: