I’ve noticed that recipes in British seem to use weights instead of volumes; does that mean you all have scales in your kitchens? Because most people I know over here sure don’t - which is why you have to do such voodoo as sifting and carefully spooning in order to try to recreate whatever conditions were used in developing the original recipe. It seems to me that for baking at least it would end up being less fiddly to just measure by weight than to try to make sure the volume measurements are perfect the way we do over here. Of course, most people don’t bother doing all the rituals required to measure properly, which makes things even worse and is probably the cause of the rise of baking mixes. :: sigh ::
We also measure weights and volumes in bizarre units that are apparently based on bodily measurements of dead kings and suchlike, which makes things even worse . . .
Are you using measuring cups for dry measure? Beacause liquid measure “1 cup” (for example a pyrex measuring cup or 8oz drinking glass) and dry measure “1 cup” are not the same volume actually. I’m pretty sure the liquid volume is larger.
So using liquid measuring cups for dry measure is my first guess. My second guess is compaction/lack of sifting as others have mentioned. You would be amazed how much volume is added by sifting.
Are you sure about that? I don’t think that’s right. There is a difference between dry gallons and liquid gallons - dry gallons are quite a bit larger. The former is equal to 128 fluid ounces (3.79 liters) and the latter is half a peck (4.40 liters). But I’m not familiar with any difference between dry and liquid cups. I think a cup is 237 ml no matter what.
Of course, measuring cups don’t tend to be terribly precise anyway.
Yes, quite sure. Its in several of my baking books, and just to be sure I just filled my 1 cup dry measure from Williams-Sonoma with water and poured it into my 1 cup Pyrex for liquid measure.
Yep, most homes have a set of kitchen scales, with scales generally in both pounds and ounces, and in kilograms and grams in the kitchen. It’d be wierd not to.
I’m quite sure it’s not true. Not only does it contradict everything I’ve read or heard about the subject (for example, from America’s Test Kitchen), but I just tried the same experiment with my measuring cups and they came out exactly the same. One of your measuring cups may be defective, or it’s possible you didn’t fill your dry measure to the absolute top (did you try it the other way - pouring from your wet measure into your dry measure?). A measured cup should be 8 ounces, wet or dry. What baking books claim that wet and dry cups measure different amounts?
The difference between measuring cups for wet and dry ingredients is not in the volumes they measure - it’s in how they’re built and used. A dry measuring cup is supposed to be accurate when the stuff being measured is level with the top of the cup. A wet measuring cup is designed to be read through the sides, and is supposed to be accurate when the bottom of the meniscus (the little curve in the surface of the liquid caused by surface tension) is even with the measurement marks on the side.
A dry measuring cup is hard to use for liquids because it has to be absolutely full, which takes time to achieve and is hard to maintain (i.e., liquids spill). A dry cup works well with solids because it’s possible to overfill it and use something straight (like a table knife) to level the ingredients with the top.
A wet measuring cup is hard to use for solids because solids aren’t self-leveling. If you try to use a wet cup to measure a cup of flour, you will have to try to smooth the surface of the flour to make it level, then add or remove flour to make it come out even with the markings. This is time-consuming and inaccurate.
Sorry, I thought I included a link. Here are is one site that agrees with me – search “liquid dry measure” and you’ll see many more. They are identical in the UK, but different in the US.
According to this site, a liquid pint is different from a dry pint, but it does not show two different sizes of cups. I don’t dispute that there are two different sizes of pints - it’s cups we’re talking about. This site defines a cup as 8 fluid ounces, and has no other definition. There is one place where it says,
But this is about volume versus weight, not two different systems of measuring volume. They are saying that four ounces of weight is not the same as four ounces of volume. This is true for most ingredients (however, an ounce volume of water weighs an ounce). It doesn’t mean that a wet measuring cup and a dry measuring cup measure different volumes.
I Googled for “liquid dry measure” and found the following sites that agree with me (that is, they don’t show two different sizes of cups for wet and dry):
but there is something wrong with their tables. For example, under Volume (Dry) it says that 1 tablespoon is equivalent to 15 ml, and 1 cup is equivalent to 225 ml. This would mean there are 15 tablespoons in a cup, but according to their own Dry Measure Equivalents table there are actually 16 tablespoons in a cup. Under Volume (Liquid) it says that 1 fluid ounce is equivalent to 30 ml, and that 1 cup is equivalent to 8 fluid ounces and also to 250 ml. Again, the math doesn’t work out - if 1 oz. is 30 ml, then 8 oz. should be 240 ml. Note, by the way, that if 1 Tbsp. of dry measure is 15 ml. and 1 fluid oz. is 30 ml., then 16 dry Tbsp. and 8 fl. oz. would both be 240 ml. - in other words, if we multiply out the smallest measurements in the Dry and Liquid Volume tables we get the same equivalent metric volume for a dry cup and a wet cup.
**Joy of Cooking[/b–] pg 590, 1975 edition – “Dry Measure Volume Equivalents” Be careful not to confuse dry measure pints and quarts with liquid measure pints and quarts. The former are about 1/8 larger than the latter.
As a pint is made up of two cups, it follows that where one pint is larger than another, so is the half volume – a cup.
Not necessarily. There’s liquid and dry pints - corresponding to the difference between liquid and dry gallons; no one’s disputing that. It doesn’t necessarily follow that half of a dry pint is any recognized measure at all. I’m not aware of dry customary volume measures being used in cooking at all - that’s just not how it works. They’re mostly used to trade quantities of stuff - like a bushel (8 dry gallons, if I remember right) of wheat or corn, or a pint (in this instance) of blueberries. Those measures aren’t used in cooking.
Again, measuring cups don’t tend to be terribly accurate. You may well find that your liquid measuring cup and dry measuring cups aren’t the same, even if you measure extremely carefully - but that’s because kitchen measuring equipment is often not terribly accurate. You might end up finding that with another set of measuring utensils, you’ll get the opposite results.
Incidentally, on their metric to customary conversion page, they list half a cup as 120 ml and one cup as 230 ml. They’re not really sweating the details.
Note that Joy of Cooking does not say the same for cups as it does for pints and quarts. That’s because, while liquid and dry pints and quarts are different sizes, there is no such distinction for cups. A liquid pint is two cups. A dry pint is not two dry cups, since there is no such thing. Half a dry pint isn’t called a cup - it’s called half a pint.
Again, I haven’t seen any reference that defines a dry cup as something different from a liquid cup. It’s not valid to infer that such a dry cup must be half a dry pint because a liquid cup is half a liquid pint.
I looked this up in my 1964 edition of Joy of Cooking. Mine is the two-volume paperback edition, and a nearly identical quote is on page 229 of the second volume. My copy says, “about 1/6 larger.” The paragraph also concludes with, “Dry measure is used for raw fruits and vegetables, when dealing with fairly large quantities.” This is followed by a table relating pints, quarts, pecks and bushels.
Directly below this on the same page is a section titled, “Comparative U.S. and British Measurements.” This section starts with a diagram showing a measuring cup labeled “8 oz.”, a large spoon labeled “16 U.S. tablespoons” and a small spoon labeled “48 U.S. teaspoons.” There are equals signs (=) between the drawings of the cup and spoons, indicating that the measurements are equivalent (e.g. one cup contains 16 tablespoons). Under the diagram is the legend:
U.S. Gill or Standard Measuring Cup for Both Solids and Liquids
In other words, according to Joy of Cooking, a liquid cup and a dry cup are the same thing.
That’s exactly what I was going to say. For frosting, you’re usually looking at 2 different qualities: sweetness and texture. Sweetness isn’t usually a problem, but the texture can be tricky – and the amount of powdered sugar you put in your frosting will make a huge difference in the texture of your frosting.
In your case, if I was unsure, I would have started with what appeared to be the smaller amount – the 1 lb. If, after adding the pound of sugar, the frosting was still very loose and liquidy, I would have continued to add powdered sugar until the frosting was a better consistency.
Most of my frosting recipes are “some” recipes – some of this, some of that, until it tastes right and/or is the right consistency for whatever I’m going to do with it. The way I see it, I’ll only need an exact recipe if I ever start selling my baked goods and people come to expect the same thing every time.
