How the parser handles real recipes: it reads 1 1/2, 1½, 3/4, 0.75 and ranges like 2-3.
Anything without a leading number — section headings, Salt and pepper to taste, a note to yourself — passes through
untouched rather than being mangled. When a scaled amount gets awkward it changes unit for you, so you get
3 tbsp instead of 0.1875 cups, and it rounds to fractions a measuring spoon can actually hit.
Scaling is arithmetic; baking is chemistry. Ingredient amounts scale linearly, but pan size, bake time and oven
temperature do not — a doubled cake in the same pan is a raw middle. Check the Pan sizes tab, keep the temperature the
same, and start checking for doneness at the original time. Leaveners and salt scale fine up to about double; far beyond
that, cut baking soda and powder slightly. Eggs don't come in halves, so weigh them (a large egg is 50 g out of the shell).
Cups → grams, per ingredient
This is the one generic converters get wrong. A cup is a volume, a gram is a weight, and the bridge between them is
the ingredient. A cup of all-purpose flour is 120 g; a cup of granulated sugar is 198 g; a cup of honey is 336 g. Any
converter offering you a single "cups to grams" answer is quietly assuming water.
Also equals
Amount
Pan size swap area-based
Batter depth is what sets bake time, so swapping pans is an area problem, not a diameter one. Going from an 8"
round to a 9" round sounds like nothing and is a 27% bigger pan — same batter spread thinner, baked sooner, and often drier.
—
Pan
Area (in²)
vs. your recipe's pan
Oven temperature incl. convection
Fan / convection ovens run hot. A convection oven moves air across the food, so it cooks as though it were roughly
25 °F (about 15 °C) hotter than the dial says. The standard fix is to drop the temperature by 25 °F and
start checking earlier. Most recipes are written for a conventional oven unless they say otherwise — and a European recipe
saying "180 °C fan" already has the adjustment baked in, so don't subtract twice.
And your oven is lying to you. Home ovens routinely run 25–50 °F off, and they swing as the element cycles. A $10
oven thermometer is the single highest-return tool in a kitchen. If everything you bake runs a little dark on the bottom or
pale on top, that's an oven calibration problem, not a recipe problem.
Kitchen reference the stuff you look up every time
Butter
1 stick
½ cup · 8 Tbsp · 113 g · 4 oz
½ stick
¼ cup · 4 Tbsp · 57 g
1 cup
2 sticks · 227 g
1 lb
4 sticks · 2 cups · 454 g
Sticks are a US packaging convention. UK, EU and Australian butter comes in 250 g or 500 g blocks, so a
recipe calling for "1 stick" means 113 g, not "half a block."
Eggs (US, out of the shell)
Large
50 g · about 3½ Tbsp
Medium
44 g
Extra-large
56 g
Jumbo
63 g
Large yolk / white
18 g / 32 g
Recipes assume large unless they say otherwise. This table is how you halve three eggs: beat them,
weigh, and use half the weight. It's also how you fix a recipe written for European eggs, which are graded by a different
scale and generally run a little bigger.
A "cup" is not one thing
US customary cup
236.6 mL
US legal cup (labels)
240 mL
Metric cup (AU, NZ, CA)
250 mL
Imperial cup (old UK)
284 mL
US tablespoon
14.8 mL (3 tsp)
Australian tablespoon
20 mL (4 tsp)
US / metric teaspoon
4.93 / 5 mL
This page uses the US customary cup throughout. The Australian tablespoon is the sneaky one: it is
four teaspoons, not three, so an Australian recipe's "1 Tbsp baking powder" is a third more leavening than an American
cook would put in.
Salt is not salt
Table salt
6 g per tsp
Morton kosher
5.3 g per tsp
Diamond Crystal kosher
2.7 g per tsp
Table salt is more than twice as salty by volume as Diamond Crystal. The crystals are a different
size and shape, so the same teaspoon holds a very different amount of salt. Most American recipe developers write for
Diamond Crystal — swapping in table salt at the same volume is how a dish ends up inedible. Convert by weight, or use the
Cups → grams tab, which lists all three separately.
The ones that quietly ruin a bake gotchas
How you fill the cup changes the flour by 20%. Scooping the cup through the bag packs it; spooning flour in and
levelling it off doesn't. That gap is roughly 25 g on a single cup — a quarter of a cup of extra flour in a cake. This is
the actual reason serious recipes give weights, and why the numbers here assume the spoon-and-level method.
Brown sugar is measured packed, and nothing else is. 213 g per cup pressed firmly into the measure. Loose brown
sugar in the same cup can be 40 g short.
Sifted before or sifted after? "1 cup sifted flour" and "1 cup flour, sifted" are different amounts — the first
sifts then measures, the second measures then sifts, and the first is noticeably less. Weighing sidesteps the whole argument.
Halving an egg is a weight problem. Beat the egg, weigh it, use half. A large egg is 50 g, so 25 g. Guessing here
is how a halved cake recipe comes out rubbery.
Doubling does not double the pan or the time. Twice the batter in the same tin bakes into a raw centre and a burnt
edge. Use two pans, or step up in area and expect a longer bake at the same temperature.
Butter sticks are American. Elsewhere butter is a block; "one stick" is 113 g. Cup measures for solid fat are
miserable anyway — weigh it.
A US pint is 16 fl oz, an Imperial pint is 20. So a British recipe's pint of cream is a quarter more than an
American one's. Same word, different measure, no warning.
Fluid ounces measure volume, ounces measure weight. They are only the same number for water, and recipes switch
between them without saying which they mean. If it pours, it's fluid ounces; if it sits on a scale, it's ounces.