Baking “Conversions” Gone Wrong

To make things more confusing, dry cups and wet cups are different volumes, though I’ve never known what the difference is, or cared, though I think they’re pretty close.

But most recipes don’t need to be that precise, and I doubt that a recipe that calls for an eighth of a teaspoon of turmeric, say, needs it to be exactly one eighth and not three-sixteenths or one-sixteenth. In any event, from the looks of it the difference between your cup and your teaspoon is proportional to the difference between our cup and our teaspoon, so if you just use variations on your cups and your teaspoons you can just use your own cups and teaspoons and you’ll end up making a little more, and put in 1/2 kilo whenever it calls for an American pound (which is a bit less than half a kilo), so you’ll end up making a little more than we’d make. (So the reason Nigel Tufnel needed to turn up to 11 was that he was using American-made equipment and he didn’t realize that an American 10 was only about a British nine and one-eighth.) A U.S. cup is a little under 250 ml. A British cup would be about 325 ml, I’m guessing, though you might know that better than I.

(Not sure that tablespoons are proportional – in fact, it looks like the U.S. and the Brit tablespoon are about the same. In the U.S. three teaspoons make a tablespoon so if you want to keep things proportional just use three teaspoons whenever it says tablespoon.)

A stick of butter is a quarter pound (so a bit less than an eighth of a kilogram), and there are eight tablespoons in a stick, so each tablespoon of butter is about 14 grams.