Baking and Math

One of my favorite hobbies is baking. This should come as no surprise since I have a serious sweet tooth. I often bake banana bread, and I always strictly adhere to the recipe guidelines to ensure that the final product is as delicious as I imagine it to be. When you are baking, you may be using measurements of cups, teaspoons, tablespoons, quarts, liters, etc. Often times, you find yourself in the kitchen with a teaspoon, but no tablespoon. Or you may have a measuring cup of 1 cup, and another of 1/2cup but no 2/3 measuring cup. Whatever you do, don’t panic.  Converting from one type of measurement to another involves a just little math and logic.

A few months ago I finally decided to write down the recipe for my mother’s famous flour tortillas, and I thought I had done pretty well, that is until I actually had to do them on my own. As I soon discovered, I had used the wrong metrics. I could tell right away that something was wrong because I ate a small amount of my dough and it was extremely salty. I was disappointed that I had failed in my first attempt, but this experience taught me how important details such as the correct metrics are. Our use of math is all around us, but I think that I enjoy it most if it has something to do with baking. So the next time that you decide to bake something, remember to double check your kitchen tools and that you can use simple conversions to get the correct amount of the ingredient that your recipe calls for.

Here is a quick conversion chart:

Happy baking!

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