Butter Measurement Conversions (...sigh)

I'm writing out some (read, all) recipes from Martha Stewart's Cupcakes and am getting quite annoyed with the measurements.  Crazy Americans!  I understand that in America they have a different sized measuring cup (in New Zealand, Australia, and some other countries, we use a cup that is 250mls, while in the States, a cup is 236.588mls or 240mls [way to make it complicated!]) and often use pounds and ounces (because they're stuck in the 19th century?).

But what I don't understand is how you measure butter.  There are sticks of butter, and there are cups/T of butter.  My phone can't (or couldn't until I just created a conversion to do it) convert sticks of butter to grams.  Edmond's Cookbook doesn't have a clue either.  In NZ and Australia, most butter is sold in a block of 500g, and on the paper there are lines that indicate 50g intervals.  You simply run a knife gently along one of these lines on the outside of the paper, then unwrap the butter, and cut along the impression you have made.  I would like to ask any American visitors to my little blog (and I know there have been a few) - how on earth do you measure a cup of butter?  A t or a T is doable, if the butter is very soft, but how on earth do you do the same with a cup?

I have looked up a conversion ratio for sticks of butter to grams of butter and for cups of butter to grams of butter and created new conversion ratios for my phone, so now I can simply look it up each time I write out a recipe.  I can see conversion ratios needing their own post in here soon.  A lot are in the front of Edmond's, but not all that I would want (for example, regular sugar is included, but not icing, caster, or brown, and the damn butter), so I might spend some time when I have nothing to write about making a nice little table.

A short note about measurements

My Mum says that you must write tblsp for tablespoon and tsp for teaspoon.  I find this really confusing, because to my mind, they look almost exactly the same.  So instead, I put an upper case T for tablespoon, and a lowercase t for teaspoon and that way I never get confused.  So if you've read any of these recipes and become confused, sorry about that, but now you know!

Also, I am aware that cups in New Zealand are a different size to cups in America (or wherever uses American cups).  Here a cup holds 250mls of water.  I've only just got a set of scales that (may or may not) work with any kind of accuracy, so usually I use the conversion tables at the beginning of the Edmonds' Cookbook to convert from grams into cups or spoons.

When it comes to baking in general (not bread baking which is quite different) measurements are only a guide.  I try to stick to them as closely as possible, especially the first time I make something, but sometimes you just need to go with the flow.  An example of this is the treacle scones I made for breakfast.  The recipe I had written down (which may have been poorly transcribed, but originated in Ladies, A Plate, a book I will probably talk about soon) asked for 225g flour, 50g butter, and 150g of milk (with treacle and spices as well), and the mixture ended up looking like a cake batter.  I panicked a little, but started adding handfuls (and I literally mean handfuls, not spoonfuls) to try to get the familiar texture of scones, and now have no idea how much flour I should use.  This has also happened when trying out recipes from the internet that are American or English, and having to add more flour because the mixture is too wet (perhaps because they use American cups?).  So just use your judgment!