Blooming cups!

[BobbyEgg]

Just wanted to say is it just me or are recipes where the measurements in cups rather than ml or grams really annoying! Been looking at overnight oats recipes and its all 1 cup this 3/4 cup that grrrr! (p.s I know I am really being unreasonable!)

I bought a set of cups from Tiger a few years ago to get around this as long as you get the ratios right it’s probably fine to use any cup tbh

I know you're just venting but it is handy sometimes - it means you can make a whole recipe with a coffee cup if you know it's just under 250ml size, and then eyeball the 1/2 cup, 3/4 cup etc. This is VERY handy in holiday lets or my MIL's house with no scales for baking.

I cook and bake a lot with US recipes, so I know in my head that a cup of liquid is just under 250mls, cup of sugar is 200g, cup of flour is 120g. Often it's easier to just use my coffee mug cup measure and do an equal scoop of each!

You can also ask Siri or Alexa to convert for you, I'm often yelling "Hey Siri, one cup oats in grammes" or "Hey Siri, gas mark 7 in celsius"

I just don't use US recipes anymore.
The faff of converting cups to accurate measurements, & then converting temp from F to C just isn't worth it.

I have a set of measuring cups for this. Rarely used but useful to have. I think they were pretty cheap from amazon?

This is something I produced for some of our customers a few years ago, it may be of some use. I have copied and pasted from Excel, so things might be all over the place:

Contrary to popular myth, the difference between a US Cup and a European Cup is negligable (1.5%)

1 Cup (Dry)	Plain Flour	100gm	
	SR Flour	111gm	
	Caster Sugar	190gm	
	Granulated Sugar	195gm	
	Brown Sugar	200gm	
	Ground Almonds	85gm	
	Butter	230gm	
	Lard	224gm	
1 Stick	Butter	114gm (4 oz)	
			
1 Cup (Liquid)	(16 tbsp/8.5 fl.oz)	240ml

Thanks 4merlyknownasSHD

That's what I mean though about it not being straight forward. If it was always 1 cup = 100g I could easily do that in my head but I feel I need to check each ingredient, which is just a right faff.

I could not agree more (but don't tell the Americans).

I don't find baking as much of an issue but cooking is the worst! How am I supposed to know how much half a cup of diced onion is? It's so much more difficult than just saying 'one onion' etc

addler ... it depends on how small your dices are (you will get more onion in if your dices are small than you will if they are big) but actually no more difficult than knowing what size of onion to use in the first place. Then again, you don't want 1/4 of a diced onion left.

It is maddening!

@addler

I don't find baking as much of an issue but cooking is the worst! How am I supposed to know how much half a cup of diced onion is? It's so much more difficult than just saying 'one onion' etc

But you could have a HUGE onion or a teeny onion, half of it is common sense. A cup of diced onion will be the same regardless of the size of the initial onion.

But what do you do with the rest of the onion? If I'm cooking I'll choose an onion size that I think will work for how I like the food to taste.

If the recipe calls for half a cup of diced onion do people start dicing an onion, scoop it into a measuring cup and then save the rest for later or throw it out?