Baking Guides
Grams to Cups Baking Conversion: Why 1 Cup of Flour ≠ 1 Cup of Sugar
"One cup of flour" is baking's biggest trap: the same cup is 120 g of flour but 336 g of honey — 2.8× apart. A cup measures volume; density decides everything else.
13 ingredients, exact grams (cup / tbsp / tsp)
| Ingredient | 1 cup (g) | 1 tbsp (g) | 1 tsp (g) |
|---|---|---|---|
| all-purpose flour | 120 | 7.5 | 2.50 |
| bread flour | 120 | 7.5 | 2.50 |
| granulated sugar | 200 | 12.5 | 4.17 |
| brown sugar (packed) | 213 | 13.3 | 4.44 |
| powdered sugar | 113 | 7.1 | 2.35 |
| cocoa powder | 85 | 5.3 | 1.77 |
| butter | 227 | 14.2 | 4.73 |
| vegetable oil | 218 | 13.6 | 4.54 |
| milk | 240 | 15.0 | 5.00 |
| heavy cream | 238 | 14.9 | 4.96 |
| honey | 336 | 21.0 | 7.00 |
| cornstarch | 112 | 7.0 | 2.33 |
| almond flour | 96 | 6.0 | 2.00 |
Why the spread
Bulk density: sugar packs dense (200 g per cup), flour is fluffy (≈120 g, ±20% depending on how you scoop), honey traps no air (336 g). Cocoa at 85 g and almond flour at 96 g — a "cup of cocoa" and a "cup of almonds" are not the same quantity of anything.
How cups fail
- Scooped vs spooned vs sifted flour: 15–25 g apart — recipes go off-balance.
- Brown sugar packed vs loose: ~30 g per cup apart.
- Converting metric recipes through "1 cup = 240 ml" compounds two errors.
What to do instead
Weigh. A kitchen scale costs less than a pizza and ends the problem: metric recipes copy straight, cup recipes convert with the table above. Tbsp/tsp columns are for spices, where spoons stay sensible.
Bake Scaler (by Xin He Jia) converts units natively (g / oz / cups / tbsp by ingredient density) and applies them to every line of the recipe. Fully offline, one-time purchase — no ads, no subscription.
Bake Scaler
Scale any recipe to any pan in a second. 11 shapes, multiple pans, whole-egg suggestions, unit guard. One-time purchase, no ads, no subscription, fully offline.
App Store