Baking with US measurements

niajs · May 24, 2011

Hey all, I'm British and living in the UK (planning a DW in Australia). I love to bake and have just bought a couple of really great cookbooks, but they're from the US and the measurements are quite different!

In the UK, we measure flour, butter etc by weight (grams or ounces) with a weighing scale. I just pour the flour into the big measuring bowl and that's it.

I've noticed that all of the US measurements are in cups, which is fine as I have a set of cups (a gift from Disney World!), but I'd like to ask how you measure dry and wet ingredients. For example, do you put the cup into the bag of flour, or do you pour the flour straight into the cup (doesn't that make a mess?!).

I've also seen, for example, 4 tablespoons of butter. Do you literally scrape a tablespoon off the block of butter?!

Sorry if these questions seem stupid, I just want to make sure my cakes turn out right!

X-Chan · May 24, 2011

hi niajs, yay baking!

I put the cup into the bag of flour and fill it then level it off usually just with the sides of the bag and take it out. Getting into more detail.. sometimes a recipe will call for sifted flour in two different ways. If it says 1 cup of flour, sifted, then you take a cup out of the bag and you sift it with a strainer before using it. If it says 1 cup of sifted flour, this is a bit of a pain but you have to sift the flour through the strainer into your cup until its full. Sifted flour is a lot less compact so it makes a big difference.

For the butter, our blocks of butter have lines on the packaging that will help you with measurements. Basically, a big package of butter (1lb) is 2 cups. There will be a line showing 1 cup, then 1/2 cup, then 1/4 cup. 4 tablespoons of butter is the same as 1/4 cup so you'd cut on that line which is 1/8th of the block. Butter also comes in sticks of 1/2 cups each so if you're buying those then you'd use half of that for 4 tablespoons.

Hope this helps! Happy baking!