American recipe help

[dizzydaisies]

I've found a gorgeous recipe for rosemary and sea salt shortbread, but need some help converting it to UK measurements. Any experts out there who can please check my interpretation??

Ingredients
2 cups all-purpose flour
(9oz plain flour?)

⅔ cup granulated sugar
(4.73oz granulated sugar?)

1 cup 2 sticks butter
(8oz butter?)

Also, can caster sugar be used for shortbread or is granulated better?

Thank you!

Hi dizzy, I can’t help with the weight conversions because I have a set of American cups, I would suggest that caster sugar is better than granulated sugar.

Also use cups here. No use to you today but I have picked some lovely measuring sets up from the pound shop.

Thanks, maybe I should get some cups to be sure!

Prestons, that was my instinct - it'd feel wrong using granulated.

Thanks everyone x

I found a chart on the Internet
here

Buy a set of cups. Twenty years ago they were tricky to obtain but now they're everywhere. The difference between US and UK fluid ounces doesn't really matter (US is 4% larger, so in rough terms 20 US fluid ounces is 21 UK fluid ounces - doesn't matter for cooking).

I replace all-purpose flour with a half and half mixture of plain flour and strong (bread) flour. American all-purpose flour is stronger (more gluten) than British plain flour, and you can in fact make shit bread with it. Some US shops sell "cake" and "pastry" flour which are closer to UK plain flour.

So is all purpose flour more like bread flour?

All purpose flour is stronger (more gluten) than plain flour, but not as strong as UK bread flour. So it makes tough pastry and slightly bread-y cake, and slightly cake-y bread. Whereas UK plain flour won't make bread, and UK bread flour makes terrible cake.