Part of my Baking Fundamentals series: These handy conversion charts can assist you in baking with ease, regardless of the units of measurement you use. Included are the most common dry and liquid volume conversions, as well as advice for measuring various types of materials.

One of the most often asked issues is how to convert recipe components to other units of measurement. Since I reside in the United States of America, as do the majority of my readers, I choose to write my recipes in US customary units:

• teaspoons
• tablespoons
• ounces
• cups
• pints
• quart
• pounds
• gallons

That final two, however, do not appear very often on this site! What would happen if they did? I’d be over here asking you to go get 6 gallons of milk and 14 pounds of butter for icing, ouch. This isn’t your typical food blog.

Well, I realize this must be vexing for non-American readers, since practically every other nation in the world utilizes the metric system (and I wish I could tell you why the U.S. hasnt gotten on board lets chalk it up to were busy, or something).

I’d want to go back and add the comparable measurements in metric units to each recipe, but it will take some time, so in the meantime, I’d like to supply you with some charts with typical metric conversions to assist my non-US readers.

But first, let’s go through the different unit abbreviations you could encounter to make sure everything is clear:

Common volume unit abbreviations

US to Metric liquid volume conversions

The tablespoon formula is 1 Tablespoon x 14.787 to produce the milliliter measurement, or 1 Cup x 240.

US to Metric dry volume conversions

The formula per cup is 1 Cup x 240 to obtain the milliliter measurement and 1 Cup x 4.167 to get the liter measurement.

Common baking conversions

Bear in mind that milliliters are rounded for ease of reading. For a more accurate conversion, multiply 1 tablespoon by 14.787 to obtain the measurement in milliliters:

Measuring butter

2 cup butter may be used alternately. To make things a little simpler, here’s a cheat sheet for butter conversions: When reading recipes that ask for 1 stick and 1 cup of butter, it might be confusing.

Converting from cups to grams and ounces

Here is when things become complicated. Each component has a varied weight, resulting in a different cups > grams > ounces conversion.

Water, milk, and butter are exceptions to the rule since they all weigh the same (1 cup = 8 ounces).

To demonstrate what I mean, here are some fast, high-level conversions for several sorts of ingredients:

Doesn’t it seem completely insane? I mean, I suppose that makes sense when you think about it. Since these things have various densities, they have distinct weights.

But doesn’t it make it harder to execute a rapid translation of cups to grams or ounces?

You may absolutely weigh your ingredients if you want to, since it is probably the most exact method, but unless otherwise specified in my recipes, I prefer to make things as simple as possible and stick to cups.

I want my recipes to be accessible to people with varying levels of baking expertise, and I want you to have some wiggle room to accommodate variations in your environment (oven calibration, elevation, climate, etc.), and I don’t expect everyone to own a kitchen scale, but if a specific recipe calls for it, I will make that clear.

I hope this was helpful! Is there anything more I should have spoken regarding this topic? Please let me know in the comments section below.

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