Gretchen's Vegan Bakery

Measuring Your Ingredients In Baking

By

Quite possibly the #1 reason for recipe failures is due to incorrect measuring.

This will be the first thing I will ask you when I get the question, 

“Gretchen, my recipe came out terrible! It looks nothing like yours on the video! What do you think went wrong?”
I will almost always answer “Double check your measurements, are you SURE you measured correctly?”
I have had terrible failures in baking many times before. So I always look to my measurements first when my recipes fail.

Often times I am rushing through, or simply not paying attention

Or I think I put in the baking powder when I actually did not, or worse yet I added it twice!
Yikes, talk about LAVA CAKES!

Don’t worry I understand, it happens to the best of us and mistakes are mistake.

I have made mistakes whether using volume measures as well as weighing on the scale.
Forget to press the TARE function? Yep, mistakes happen.

But what I am talking more specifically about is INFERIOR measuring devices

Such as the “Good Ol'” American Cups and Spoons!

CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL YOUTUBE VIDEO FOR MEASURING WITH A SCALE VS CUPS & SPOONS

Here’s the deal about the Volume Measuring System:

A cup is a cup. But what you put in that cup makes all the difference in the world!
Don’t be confused by thinking, “well, my cup measure says it is 8 ounces. So if I need 8 ounces of flour, then that’s 1 cup. Right?”
WRONG!
So you see we are already being tricked with weights vs. volume in the American measuring system.
The answer is easily explained when you think about 1 cup of feathers and 1 cup of rocks.

Everyone knows these two things don’t weigh the same amount even though they have the same volume.

This holds true for ingredients because density (therefore weight) does vary from ingredient to ingredient.
Not to mention, the word “ounce” can refer to both volume (capacity) and weight (mass).
There are ‘weight’ ounces and there are ‘fluid’ ounces. For example, you can have 4 ounces of flour (weight) and 4 fluid ounces of milk (volume).

Two totally different things.

You could put a ½ cup  of flour into a liquid measure that reads ½ c= 4oz. But this is FALSE. 
A half cup of flour is NOT 4oz at all, it is more like 2.25 oz.

And just for the record:  OUNCE = WEIGHT!

So you are already doing it! Just INCORRECTLY!

Let’s take this thinking over to the Metric System.
If I need a cup of flour it will weigh 125g. *this is the standard agreement for the weight of a cup of flour
But one cup of sugar weighs 200g.

This is the rocks vs feathers example

And a good thing to always remember when getting used to this new way of measure.
Please take a moment to check out this video where I explain more in a visual about using a scale versus measuring cups CLICK HERE (and skip to 7:47 minutes in the video)

So believe me,  if you can just invest less than $15 on a digital scale, your recipes will start to transform!
I do understand that some of you cannot simply spend the money right now. I GET IT!
So in the meantime you will have to do some extra work in converting your recipes.
Check out this great website for help there INGREDIENT CONVERSIONS

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Gretchen

    Hi Thanks! Yes I love them too! They are just so darned cute! Here’s a tip for scaling recipes to fit pans. 1 recipe typically makes 2-8″ cake layers ALL that same batter from the recipe will fit into 1-half sheet (12″ x 18″) for 1 layer of a sheet cake So, that means 2- 1/4 sheets (if you have those) OR tada….. your 4- 1/8 sheet pans for perfect layers to make a nice beautiful rectangle cake with exact same sized layers for easy building! Hmm…. I may have to do a video for that one! LOL

  2. Melissa Rizzo

    Hi Gretchen, how are you? My name is Melissa Rizzo and I’ve been a fan of yours ever since the Woodland bakery days. You have been a big inspiration to me and have taught me so much so I thank you so much for that! 😀

    Baking/cake decorating has been my hobby and passion for a while now and I’m pleased to say that I completed my first official cake order (two specialty cakes) from a co worker last week. My co worker was very happy with the results and was the highlight of her party. In turn I have now received another baking order although this time it’s a cupcake order from another co worker.

    I would greatly appreciate it if you can please give me some advice on a general guideline to price cakes and cupcakes to ensure that I am not under or over pricing. I have been struggling with this and want to learn the correct way. Thank you in advance and I look forward to hearing back from you 😀

  3. Jitka

    Hi Gretchen, I only found you now by a chance when searching for a vegan Italian meringue (and found your buttercream). And this hooked me, you got yourself a new fan! 🙂 I (as a Czech person) usually suffer with recipes online because so many of them are American based and therefore use the volume cups measurements which to me seem completely ridiculous. You have no idea how happy it makes me that I found another American creator who promotes the weight measurements (I’d be alright with recipes being in ounces by weight, that’s at least easy to convert to the metric measurements). In general, I’m a huge advocate for always (not only in baking) having written both of the options and I love you for doing that here. Can’t wait to try your recipes! Love from Prague, Jitka.

  5. Shelley

    Hi Gretchen
    Thank you very much for all the wonderful recipes you share with us. I have used more than a few now. Just a couple of days ago I made the Strawberry Cake for my husband’s birthday and unfortunately it failed. I did weigh everything but I think my weigh scale is not accurate. Could you please recommend any weigh scales or share the one that you prefer to use? Thanks Very much 🙂