How do I use American (US) cup measures?

It’s a rather different way of measuring, because as a rule, we weigh our ingredients in the UK.
Needless to say, measuring a volume of ingredients rather than weighing them can be unreliable because it is so easy to over-pack things into the cups. You can end up with as big a difference as 1oz. Doesn’t sound much, but in baking, ratios are everything.
We’ve all eaten nasty, floury-tasting cakes – that’s due to too big a ratio of flour to fats and sugars. If you read older cookery books, the ratio of flour is much greater because it was a way to make a cake go further, but in the process, destroys the texture and, surely, the whole point.
I mean, I could make my cereal go further by sweeping the floor straight into the packet. Exactly.

Having said all that, there is something very pleasing about flinging cups of ingredients into a big bowl – it feels more like relaxed cooking to me. I was lucky enough to have the method explained to me, so I shall ‘pay it forward’, so to speak, and demonstrate how to measure in cups.

First, flour.
The big thing about measuring flour is not to pack it into the cup. You spoon (drop, almost) it in to the point of over-filling and then level it off with the back of a knife. As you can see, I have taken to storing my plain flour in a tupperware container. It’s so much easier to hold the cup over the container and level off the excess flour back into the container.
Anyway, a picture (or several) is worth a thousand words:

Now on to sugar. Caster sugar is easy because it won’t over-pack. It is what it is.Free flowing and not sticky.

Brown sugar is a different matter. A recipe will call for it to be lightly or firmly packed.
You do have to spread it out into the cup – if you used the same method as flour, you would get big gaps in the cup and would under-measure it – but to do that, I use the side of the spoon as a kind of ‘chopping’ device; that is, I spread it out by lightly chopping on to it and encouraging an equal spread that way.
You can’t level the top off with a knife because brown sugar clumps – you would just knock whole lumps out – so just level it to the top of the cup by eye.

I’ll show you lightly packed first.

What a disappointing sandcastle…

———————————————————————-

Now to firmly packed.

Press it down with the back of the spoon and build up the layers

Now, this is a pleasing sandcastle

It even kept its shape when I put it back into the bag

Here are the metric equivalents for US cups (near as you can get, anyhow) because liquid is measured in cups as well, so it’s handy to remember when working out what size tub of sour cream you need.

1      = 250ml
1/2  = 125ml
1/3  = 75ml
1/4  = 50ml