← Spark & Whetstone · Thinking in Rates
The Half-Batch Card
Halving a recipe is easy until the recipe says ¼ cup. Paste the ingredients, one per line, choose how much to make, and the card turns every amount into measures your drawer holds.
The recipe
Start each line with the amount: 2, 1.5, 1/3, 1 1/2 or ¾. Cups, tablespoons (tbsp) and teaspoons (tsp) come back in kitchen measures; grams and millilitres are scaled as numbers.
The card
How the card measures
Every cup, tablespoon and teaspoon amount is turned into teaspoons first: a tablespoon is 3 teaspoons and a cup is 48. The new amount is then built back up from the largest measure that fits, so a third of ¼ cup (12 teaspoons ÷ 3 = 4) comes out as 1 tablespoon and 1 teaspoon. Amounts are rounded to the nearest ⅛ teaspoon. Counts such as eggs are rounded to a quarter, and the card says when that is not a whole egg.
Baking is chemistry, so a scaled cake may need a different tin or a different time; the card scales the amounts, not the oven. These are US cup measures; a metric cup (250 ml) is a little larger.
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