Help with Converting between Cups & Grams

The beauty of blogging is you can reach out to kindred spirits from all over the world at the click of a button. You can get to know people from countries and walks of life it would be impossible to encounter without the help of the internet.

Being a food blog, this can make things a little tricky, especially when baking. You see, I am an English lass and one who grew up with the metric system. So for me, that it how I work and how I record my recipes. I have no problem with American cups because I’ve done so much baking, I know when it’s okay to be imprecise and when it absolutely will not cut the mustard at all! Indeed, I have quite an obsessive little collection of American cup sets in my kitchen dresser lol! 

I can’t recommend strongly enough to readers who want to develop their baking skills and be confident that whatever they are baking will come out of their oven consistently and reliably baked, to buy a set of digital scales. I invested in these Heston Blumenthal scales which I love (as I can weigh yeast out to the gram on the small scale plate as well as doing the more usual ingredients on the larger one – yes, I am *that* pedantic with my yeasted doughs!):

[easyazon_infoblock align=”center” identifier=”B00DW419G0″ locale=”UK” tag=”evnocr-21″]

The set I had many (and I do mean many) years before I upgraded to the Heston ones were these, and they were very reliable indeed but much less spendy:

[easyazon_infoblock align=”center” identifier=”B000ZNM51O” locale=”UK” tag=”evnocr-21″]

Now, to help folk who regularly use cup measures, I’ve put together this graphic to help you convert my recipes. These are the amounts I use when I am converting American recipes to more familiar grams. The crucial thing to remember is that weight and volume are *not* synonymous (blimey, I’m having a flashback to my GCSE Physics classroom!) so different ingredients have different weights, despite only being 1 cup’s worth. These are the most common ones and I’ve also included some volume conversions and oven temperatures to make life easier too:

measurement-conversions

If you want to use an internet search engine to convert measures, can I recommend the Traditional Oven site? It tends to come up in the first two or three searches on Google and it really does have an excellent database of conversions of almost every imaginable common baking ingredient and I find it very reliable.

And finally, I’ve been collecting useful conversion charts of all kinds over on Pinterest and you may which to use this as another frame of reference too. There are tons of helpful info graphics there, much more than just weights and volumes. I keep adding to it too so you may want to follow the board to be sure not to miss on any good finds I come across on my travels.

Happy baking everyone!

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