OK this one fmu. I looked up a baking instruction for flour: "spooned and leveled"; I had an idea what it meant, but not why. The claim was that scooping a whole cup out of the container compacts the flour, resulting in more flour than you're supposed to be using. Spooning flour into a cup is supposed to yield much closer to the proper amount.
And I thought, no, this is old wives' nonsense, probably in the middle ages they used measuring cups made of pebbles that weren't very accurate or something. No way this is true. But I'm not one to leave these things to chance, and a LOT of people were saying the same thing. So I tested it.
For the record, 1 cup of AP flour is supposed to weigh 120 grams.
First photo: scooped and leveled with a baking scraper. Second photo: spooned and leveled. By the way I did this test twice and got the exact same results +/- 2 grams.
You should just get a gram-accurate scale if you do a lot of baking; fiddling over how you get your ingredients out of the container is, in fact, the kind of silliness I don't put up with. The difference up there is 15%, definitely enough to change what you're baking! So I guess I'm weighing from now on.
bonus for weight based baking is being able to just dump ingredients into a bowl without a measuring cup too! can save on dishes
just put the mixing bowl on the scale and zero/tare it
