For brilliant bakes, precision makes perfect
QI love the look of American baking books, but I’m having mixed results when I cook the recipes. I’m using the cup measurements – am I doing it wrong?
AI’m feeling your frustration here: like you, I find those voluptuous American bakes deeply seductive, but ugh, how I hate cup measurements. Not entirely – for some recipes, soups or stews say, they make perfect sense. A teacupful of rice is plenty specific enough where 10 per cent either way really doesn’t matter, and giving measurements to the gram feels nitpicking when it comes to vegetables. But baking is in part a chemical formula, so precision matters. Yet sticking a cup into a bag of flour just isn’t that precise
– when I asked two of my family each to measure out a cup of flour, the weight differed by nearly 20 per cent, enough to throw a fine-tuned cake recipe out.
The fact is, the exact amount of flour or sugar you have in a cup will depend on several factors, particularly how densely packed the ingredients are. Even Stateside, they are beginning to lose the love for this style of
measurement. Cups used to be pretty much standard in US recipe books, but increasingly they are opting to put both weights and cup measurements in.
So, back to your baking books. One route is to weigh the ingredients, although frustratingly, while there are plenty of tables converting cups of various ingredients into weights, these vary too. Flour is usually reckoned to be 120g-140g. I work with 120g for plain or self-raising, 140g for strong flour. Granulated sugar and caster sugar weigh 200g per cup, while icing sugar is more like 115g.
If you want to stick with cups, it’s worth investing in a proper set of cup measures, rather than using a measuring jug, as you need to be able to level them off. Even then, it’s not
American bakes may use cup measurements straightforward. A US cup is 237ml, but a metric cup, used by Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa, is 250ml. (Canadian friends tell me some old books use a 227ml cup.) So decide what kind you want,
and make sure that they each give the correct volume only when full to the top, not a few millimetres below the top.
Some ingredients, particularly brown sugar, may call for “packed” cups.
For these, you jam as much in as you can, pressing down, before levelling off with a knife as before. But to measure flour (or any loose, fine-grained ingredient, such as caster sugar) you need a light hand. Start by stirring the flour a couple of times – easier to do if the flour is in a jar than in a bag, and it’s an important step. With a large spoon, spoon the flour into the measuring cup until it is heaped above the top all round. Don’t tap the cup to level the flour, as it’ll settle and you’ll get too much flour
in. Draw the blade of a knife across the top of the cup, sliding the excess back in the jar, and leaving you with a perfectly level cupful of flour.
If your cakes still aren’t turning out as you’d expect, it’s worth bearing in mind that American ingredients can be subtly different: their flour tends to have a higher gluten content, for example. It may make sense to go back to books that are designed for our produce, such as The Violet Bakery Cookbook, by Californian Clare Ptak, which includes a huge, fail-safe, all-American Red Velvet Cake.
If you want to stick with cups, invest in a proper set of measures
Email your culinary conundrums to Xanthe Clay at askxanthe@ telegraph.co.uk