Is it possible to add too much sugar into your chocolate cake, even though you followed the recipe? Although we won’t complain if it happens, it might end up ruining your dessert! Mairlyn Smith teaches us how to measure dry and liquid ingredients correctly.

How to measure dry ingredients:

When measuring flour, do not scoop the cup into your bowl, instead spoon the flour in. Overfill the measuring cup with the flour, then take a straight edge and level it. Make sure you do not shake the measuring cup while filling it, because then you’ll overpack the ingredient. Follow the same steps for other dry ingredients, but an exception to this rule is brown sugar. The correct way to measure brown sugar is to pat down the sugar as you go along.

How to measure liquid ingredients:

To measure liquid ingredients, pour it into your liquid measuring cup and eyeball it. To measure correctly be sure to do it at eye-level — this will ensure you have an accurate or close-to-perfect measurement.

Measuring scale:

According to Mairlyn, chefs and U.K. residents are more likely to measure ingredients on a kitchen scale. If you have one at home be sure to use it when measuring your dry ingredients because it’s a much more definitive way to measure!

Herbs and spices:

Herbs and spices are a great way to add flavour into your recipe.

A herb is a green plant and the leaves are used either dry or fresh. Fresh herbs are added at the end of a recipe, while dry herbs are added at the beginning.

A spice is a root, bark or seed that has been dried. Use measuring spoons to get an accurate amount of spice in your recipe. You want to scoop the spice into a measuring spoon and level it off.

Tips:

Be sure to know whether the ingredient you are using is a dry or liquid. You can always look online if you are unsure. Below are some ingredients and the category they fall under — some of them may surprise you!

Yogurt: Dry ingredient
Liquid honey:  Liquid ingredient
Dry creamed honey: Liquid ingredient

Courtesy Mairlyn Smith
www.mairlynsmith.com
@mairlynsmith