Nowhere in cooking is accurate measuring as important as in baking. While some recipes are more forgiving than others, you will not achieve consistently excellent results in cake making with haphazard measurement. The most critical measurements are for flour, liquids, and leavenings, but if you wish to duplicate results from one time to the next, you will measure every ingredient accurately. Reduced-fat recipes are especially vulnerable: a little too much flour can transform a good cake into a dry, leaden one. Weighing ingredients on a scale is the easiest way to measure accurately. If you prefer to use measuring cups, be sure to sift flour before measuring when sifted flour is called for, because 1 cup of unsifted all-purpose flour weighs 5 ounces, while 1 cup of sifted all-purpose flour weighs only 4 ounces. Whether or not the recipe calls for sifted flour, do not pack the flour into the measuring cupΓÇösimply spoon it in lightly. For dry ingredients such as flour and sugar, use dry measuring cups in the exact increments you are measuring: a half-cup measure to measure 1/2 cup, a quarter-cup measure to measure 1/4 cup, etc. Level the ingredients by sweeping a knife across the top of the cup. Measure small quantities of dry ingredients, such as leavenings, with measuring spoons, precisely leveled off; donΓÇÖt use your tableware. Use clear glass or plastic measuring cups marked off in increments for measuring liquids. Check the level of the liquid at eye level; looking down at the cup is not accurate. If we sound like fuddy-duddies, just taste our cakes!
Sifting flour accomplishes several aims, one of which is to render volume measurements more consistent by eliminating the difference between a canister of loosely packed flour and a sack of flour that the kids have been sitting on. When flour is measured after sifting (by sifting onto wax paper and pouring or spooning lightly into the cup before leveling), it makes no difference how packed or loose the flour was to start. If you measure flour by weight, you need not sift first (5 ounces of flour is 5 ounces of flour regardless of whether or not it has been sifted), but you may want to sift it after weighing in order to combine it with other dry ingredients and aerate it so that it mixes more easily into batters.
