The ingredients where accuracy decides the result
Most baking failures blamed on the oven start at the measuring cup, and four ingredients cause nearly all of them. Flour is the worst offender. A US cup of plain flour, spooned in loosely and levelled off, weighs about 120 grams. Flour is a compressible powder: it settles in the bag, packs under its own weight, and compacts further the moment you drag a cup through it. Two cooks following the same recipe can be 25 grams apart per cup without either doing anything obviously wrong. Cake flour is milled finer and sits even lighter, around 114 grams to the cup.
Sugar behaves better, but only the granulated kind. Its crystals flow like dry sand and fill a cup the same way every time, landing at about 200 grams. Caster sugar runs slightly heavier at 210 grams because the finer crystals nest closer together. Brown sugar is its own animal: the molasses coating makes it sticky and full of trapped air, which is why recipes specify it firmly packed, at 220 grams per cup. Icing sugar goes the other way entirely. It aerates like flour and an unsifted cup weighs just 120 grams, three-fifths of its granulated cousin.
Butter should never meet a measuring cup at all. It is a solid; pressing it into a cup leaves hidden air pockets, and digging it out again wastes a good scraper. One full cup is 227 grams, which is two US sticks or a shade under a standard 250 gram Australian block. Cut it by weight and move on.
Then there is cocoa, the lightest thing in the baking drawer at roughly 85 grams per cup. It clumps, it aerates, and because it is a drying ingredient rather than a wet one, an accidental extra 20 grams turns a fudgy brownie into something closer to potting mix. If you weigh only one ingredient in a chocolate recipe, make it this one.
Liquids, and why water is the only honest one
Water is the single ingredient where volume and weight agree: a 240 millilitre cup of it weighs exactly 240 grams, so millilitres and grams are interchangeable and any measuring jug tells the truth. Everything else drifts. Milk comes in a touch heavier at 245 grams per cup. Oils float, literally and numerically: olive oil is about 216 grams per cup and vegetable oil 218, which is why oil measured by grams on a scale looks like less than the recipe seems to want.
The sticky liquids are where weighing earns its keep. Honey and golden syrup both weigh about 340 grams per cup, and maple syrup around 320. Try to measure a cup of golden syrup by volume and you will grease the cup, pour, scrape, swear, and still leave 20 grams behind. Put the mixing bowl on the scale, zero it, and pour straight in until the number says stop. Nothing to wash, nothing left behind.
Cups to grams for the baking staples
The figures below use a US 240 millilitre cup with spoon-and-level measuring (brown sugar packed, icing sugar unsifted), rounded to the nearest gram, with halves rounded up. They match the MeasureMate converter exactly.
| Ingredient | 1/2 cup | 1 cup |
|---|---|---|
| Plain / all-purpose flour | 60 g | 120 g |
| Cake flour | 57 g | 114 g |
| Granulated white sugar | 100 g | 200 g |
| Caster (superfine) sugar | 105 g | 210 g |
| Brown sugar (packed) | 110 g | 220 g |
| Icing / powdered sugar | 60 g | 120 g |
| Butter | 114 g | 227 g |
| Cocoa powder (unsweetened) | 43 g | 85 g |
| Honey | 170 g | 340 g |
| Milk | 123 g | 245 g |
| Almond meal / flour | 48 g | 96 g |
| Chocolate chips | 85 g | 170 g |
Oven temperatures: Celsius, Fahrenheit, gas marks and fan-forced
Oven conversion trips people up because there are two correct answers. The exact conversion of 180 °C is 356 °F, but no recipe on earth says 356. Recipe writers work in conventional pairs, and you should convert to the pair, not the formula. The ones worth memorising: 150 °C is 300 °F and gas mark 2, a slow oven for meringues and rich fruit cakes. 160 °C is 325 °F and gas mark 3, for dense cakes that need time. 180 °C is 350 °F and gas mark 4, the everyday setting for most cakes, biscuits and muffins. 190 °C is 375 °F and gas mark 5; 200 °C is 400 °F and gas mark 6, where scones, pastry and bread live; and 220 °C is 425 °F and gas mark 7 for pizza and anything that wants an aggressive start.
Fan-forced ovens complicate this in one predictable way. Moving air transfers heat faster, so a fan oven cooks like a conventional oven set about 20 °C higher. Recipes are almost always written for conventional heat, so if your oven is fan-forced (as most Australian ovens are), drop the stated temperature by 20 °C: a recipe calling for 180 °C becomes 160 °C fan. Skip that adjustment and you get dark edges, pale middles and cakes that dome and crack.
Scaling recipes up and down
Doubling a recipe by volume is an exercise in fractions: one and a half cups becomes three, two thirds becomes one and a third, and three quarters of a tablespoon becomes a guess. Scale by weight instead and the arithmetic is trivial. Multiplying 120 grams of flour by 1.5 gives 180 grams, no special cups required, and the answer is exact rather than re-measured through the same unreliable scoop.
Eggs are the awkward unit because they refuse to come in fractions. When a halved recipe demands one and a half eggs, crack two into a cup, whisk them smooth, and weigh out what you need; a large egg contributes roughly 50 grams once it is out of the shell, so one and a half eggs is about 75 grams of whisked egg. The leftover goes into tomorrow's scramble.
Rounding is fine if you round the right things. Flour, sugar and butter tolerate rounding to the nearest 5 grams without any detectable change. Salt, spices and raising agents do not: they are used in such small quantities that rounding them proportionally can double their effect, so measure those with proper teaspoon fractions or a scale that reads single grams. And remember that time does not scale with quantity. A doubled cake in a bigger tin needs a longer bake at the same temperature, not a hotter one, so start checking early and trust the skewer.
When close enough is fine, and when to weigh
Not everything deserves the scale. A crumble topping, a rustic muffin, a pot of soup or a tray of roast vegetables will forgive a 10 percent wobble in any direction, and cups are genuinely quicker for that kind of cooking. Weigh when the flour-to-liquid ratio is the whole recipe: bread doughs, where hydration percentage decides the crumb; pastry, where extra flour means cardboard; macarons and sponges, where the margin is a few grams either way. A fair rule of thumb: the fewer ingredients a recipe has and the prouder its author sounds, the more the grams matter.
When you need the numbers rather than the theory, the cooking converter handles any ingredient and amount, the cups to grams page charts the everyday staples, with a converter that covers more than 30 ingredients, and the temperature converter covers every oven dial. More measuring questions are answered in the FAQ.