Help me make sense of cup sizes to gram conversions, they dont add up. Literally

[soupfiend]

So here is the american sizing (Its an American website/recipe)

• 1 1/4 cups unsalted butter, melted
• ▢1 1/2 cups light brown sugar
• ▢1 cup granulated sugar
• ▢4 large eggs, room temperature
• ▢2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• ▢1 1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
• ▢3/4 cup all purpose flour
• ▢1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
• ▢1/2 cup chopped hazelnuts
• ▢2 tablespoons hazelnut butter, substitute chocolate hazelnut spread
• ▢flaky sea salt, optional

Here is the metric conversion they give

• 284 g unsalted butter, melted
• ▢330 g light brown sugar
• ▢200 g granulated sugar
• ▢4 large eggs, room temperature
• ▢2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• ▢129 g unsweetened cocoa powder
• ▢94 g all purpose flour
• ▢0.5 teaspoon kosher salt
• ▢60 g chopped hazelnuts
• ▢2 tablespoons hazelnut butter, substitute chocolate hazelnut spread
• ▢flaky sea salt, optional

Here is what the cup sizes worked out to be when I weighed them

1.25 cups of melted butter is around 270g (almost the same as recipe)
1.5 cups of brown sugar (although I realised it was dark brown, although it looked light brown), is 235g (much less than the recipe)
1 cup of white sugar is 200g (same as recipe)
3/4 cup of flour is 98g (same as recipe give or take)
1.5 cup of cocoa powder 183g (much more than recipe)

When Ive made this before, I have stuck to the metric and found it so runny (its a brownie) that it virtually doesnt cook and it falls apart. Today's was a bit more solid, but I wont know until tomorrow if its ok

So what do you do when converting from cups to grams. I googled cups to grams and the conversion above is what is on google but it doesnt add up when you weigh the cup amounts yourself.

Another recipe I have calls for cups and things like butter, you cant put that in a cup and try to make sense of it, you would have to squish it all in. Same with peanut butter.

have you tried using this?

https://bakingcalculators.com/convertrecipe/Default.aspx

Ive used lots of converters, the measurements given above are the same as standard 'conversions', I did a lot of googling for this. My problem is they dont work, its not correct. The converter above says a cup of cocoa powder is 80g, my measurement was 163g. Thats virtually double

Plus how do you measure a cup of something that wont fit in a cup? I often see 'a cup of green beans' or as my examples above, a cup of butter, a cup of peanut butter or cup of chocolate spread. Huge amount of work to try to squish all that in a cup, ensure theres no gaps at the bottom and then get it all back out again, so I want recipes in weights. But a lot of the recipes I keep finding are all cups.

Sorry I mean my cocoa powder was 123g, 40g more than the 'converter'

Volume and weight just don’t correspond, it’s like a cup of lead vs a cup of feathers.
So I either skip the American recipe or Google every single ingredient’s cup weight. Every time…

I’d find a different recipe if I were you!! especially if you’ve made it before and it was too runny and didn’t coke properly - why not look for a different recipe using a measurement which makes sense? I avoid anything measured in cups for exactly the reasons you’ve outlined.

Disappointing. I thought this might be a formula to work out how heavy my breasts are.

As you were.

The cup weight for each ingredient, when googled, is exactly as is written in the recipe. The conversions are wrong, online, on converters, everywhere.

The problem is the flavour is lovely (bowl nearly clean by the time it reaches the sink) and Im not a natural baker so I dont understand how to check if a recipe has the right proportions for a brownie. I literally have no idea how to check proportions in a recipe and whether its right.

So I have browsed possibly 100s and 100s of brownie recipes. The proportions in them every single time are completely different. Some use tons of flour. Others use hardly any eggs. Some use actual chocolate, some use cocoa powder. Some use not very much butter, some use not very much sugar. I just dont know what Im looking for.

Or use actual cup measures? Cheap and easy enough to get hold of.

You are better off using ml rather than weight if you don’t want to do cups. Volume to weight never works well.

Well as I said above so many brownie recipes are american, its all cup sizes. I dont know how they cook properly I really dont.

Ive got cup measures!! How do you think I managed to convert them and compare them. I weighed each item in the cups and the measurement does not match the conversion given in the recipe (which is a standard conversion)

I think cups are unreliable because it depends how tightly you pack the cup

A set of cups can be picked up for under £5, if you’re going to follow a recipe that uses cups then the easiest thing is to use cups! And yes, for things like butter/ Nutella etc you need to squish them in (or melt them so they’re more liquid), if squishing you can be somewhat approximate and it doesn’t matter if there is the odd gap, I tend to do a heaped cup so that it doesn’t matter if there are a few gaps where the ingredient doesn’t touch the bottom. Very few recipes are going to fail because the measurement of an ingredient such as peanut butter is a little bit off either way.

I always find this works well for me though, I have a copy in the kitchen.

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0562/3883/3827/files/Cup_to_grams_conversion_table_for_dried_ingredients.pdf?v=1672659285

Hi OP, as previous poster said, cups measure volume, how big is something while grams measure mass, how much something weighs. To convert from American recipes to metric I would look up cups to ml.

Anyone else got bra adverts popping up in this thread? 😂

How do you convert a cup of cocoa powder or brown sugar to ml?

I mean how do I measure 100ml of cocoa powder!

You can't convert because of the volume vs weight issue. You have to use one system or the other. Just buy a set of cup measures.

Yes thats the standard conversions of cups to grams found everywhere online. Its not accurate as Ive set out above.

A pain for anything that doesn't pour

Silicone spatulas are useful here, they can be used to squash stuff down and then to scrape everything out so there isn’t lots left in the cup.

Just in case other posters dont read the OP

I HAVE A SET OF CUPS - THAT IS HOW I MANAGED TO MEASURE THE WEIGHT OF THE INGREDIENTS AND WORK OUT THE CONVERSION WAS WRONG

The cups are marked in Ml and you can just measure that - it's still a volume measurement.

There are standards for how tightly you are supposed to pack the sugar etc for brown sugar; white sugar is pretty standard

To measure butter etc, you fill a larger measuring cup half full of water, and then cut the approx amount of butter and drop it in until the water level rises to the right measurement. Most butter conversions to grams work fine though and butter is often sold in the right sizes anyway.

It's fine just to bake in cups and use volume measurements - north americans have done it forever and you just learn how to cook that way (I grew up there) - much less faffing really than weighing stuff, although I do that now too. But volume recipes are often much easier.

I’d be foregoing the cocoa flavoured brownies for a recipe that uses actual chocolate although I accept that’s an expensive fix. There’s loads of great Brownie recipes with no cups involved! It is quite a loose batter but the chocolate fudges it up if you see what I mean.
MIL once proudly presented us with a breeze block of a loaf from her new bread maker. The recipe said ‘cups’. She hadn’t spotted the one in the box and had used a mug 😂

I don't mind volume measurements as long as butter is by mass! It's easy just to cut butter by the 50g lines.