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.
