shermarama

Graaah. I'm doing yet more Christmas baking today, and while I'm glad people post interesting recipes on the internet, I wish Americans wouldn't write them so stupidly.

Cups are a stupid unit. In the US, as in everywhere else in the Western world, stuff is sold by weight. Therefore, if you're looking at half a 1 kg bag of something, how many cups have you got left? Some unguessable amount that depends on the density of the stuff. Now let's read a recipe in weight; what weight is left in this half-full 1 kg bag? About 500g. Is that enough for the recipe? Yes or no is pretty easy to guess. If you don't want to guess, you can even weigh the bag, subtract a bit for the bag itself and then see. Cups? Er.. yeah. Maybe we'll just buy some more anyway because we can't tell. Probably best buy a big bag because it's difficult to tell if this 500 g bag of sugar in the shop is enough for n cups.
The 'stick', the 'can' and the 'package' are not units. Even assuming that the people reading the recipe are shopping in places that sell ingredients in the same standard sizes as where the writer is, almost everything comes in more than one size depending on how much you need; are readers supposed to be psychic, to guess which size the author bought? I'm prepared to accept that in the UK, a very common size of can of tomatoes is 400 g, for example, but given that that's not true everywhere, how hard is it to write 'a 400 g can of tomatoes'? Especially in a recipe that's going on the internet, where it could be read by people on the other side of the world?
Packeted, bottled, canned, pre-made mixes have no place in cake recipes. I saw one recently where the two main ingredients were 'a can of cherry pie filling' and 'a package of biscuit mix'. That's not a recipe, it's an insult. Even, even in Vegan With A Vengeance, which is surely a book about making food out of food, the author admits to having had to make up an analogue of a packet veggie crumbles mix, because otherwise her mother was trying to insist on putting the original brand-name packet in. I am prepared to accept condensed milk, for example, as a useful base ingredient to put in with everything else, but this page thinks that '1 pkg. yellow cake mix, 3/4 cup Miracle Whip, 1 pkg. Dream Whip' mixed with some eggs, orange juice and orange zest, fits in the 'Best Cakes' recipe collection. You know, I don't think I have to try that to know that it's going to be pretty ropey.
Oh, yes, and that recipe suggests that you need to mix it with an electric mixer. If you write 'beat together butter and sugar' then people can make their own choice of what to use; wooden spoon, spatula, fork, electric mixer, whatever. If you write, as today's recipe has done, 'beat together butter and brown sugar... with an electric mixer at medium-high speed for 3 minutes,' then if you're the sort of person who doesn't believe you need to buy bulky consumer electrical goods in order to make biscuits, you have to translate it. As I've already had to translate this recipe using this handy website which knows the density of foodstuffs and can be used to de-cup-ify.

Of course, I'm making this particular recipe because I think it's going to be good. I just had to stop it being written in gibberish first.