I've Been Doing It Wrong All My Life!

Sally's Ingredients

I needed to whip up some cookie cakes for this weekend. Of course, one of my pet peeves about cookies is when they aren't soft. Cookies should ALWAYS be soft. ALWAYS. Most times, I can create a soft cookie, but chocolate chip cookies have always defied my best attempts. No matter what I add, I can't get it right.

But, I needed to get over that fear, so I decided I would make them as cookie cakes this weekend. Thanks to Google "soft chocolate chip cookie cake", I stumbled upon this recipe from Sally's Baking Addiction. Great pictures. Great prose. Don't fail me now, Sally.

When I started to read through the recipe, something caught my eye. Do you see it? Right there after "2 cups (250g) all-purpose flour" it specifically says CAREFUL NOT TO OVERMEASURE. Sally goes on to explain the correct way to measure flour in her Measuring 101 post. Sally, you're my hero. Who knew all these years I had been measuring my flour wrong???

I got out my trusty food scale (thanks, sister Lindsay) and set off to finding out how terribly I'd messed up in the past. To get the most out of your scale (and avoid the math), you'll need to put your measuring cup on the scale and then press the "tare" button. This will set the scale to zero so that you don't have to subtract out how much your measuring cup weighs.

Based on the "normal" way I'd get a cup of flour (scooping with the measuring cup and then scraping excess from top with a flat edge), I was getting 161 grams! One cup should only weigh 125 grams. That's 29% MORE FLOUR than necessary. In fact, this recipe calls for two cups, so I would have used almost 60% more than I should have if I'd persisted in my naïve measuring.

Wow. Yep. That pretty much explains it. Thanks, Sally.

What have you been doing wrong all these years?