My dear, sweet brother Pete gave me a cookbook for Christmas, Nigella Lawson’s Feast. It’s a beautiful book; page after page of awesome food photographs. But I seriously wonder if he actually read any of the recipes.

Perhaps he chose it for its esoteric perfection, but more likely it was an evil attempt to drive his just slightly older sister mad. He is, afterall, the brother who once shaved the hair off my Ken doll. Mom made him draw it back with a black felt marker, but he just had to add a moustache.

You see, Nigella, who is British, speaks a mixture of “Imperial” and “Metric” with a touch of “Quaint” to add further confusion. That is to say, she combines teaspoons with millilitres; and if she isn’t referring to “small pots” of something, she is measuring her dry ingredients in grams. Grams! Yikes, what’s the conversion for that!

In my first attempt at using her book, I quickly hit a brick wall when one of the key ingredients in a fabulous looking chocolate trifle was something called Morello cherries. I turned to another, more familiar book, placing this weighty picture book on the coffee table where it seemed more suited.

As St. Patrick’s Day was approaching, I recalled seeing a recipe for a Guinness chocolate cake, and was inspired to tackle the book again. All I had to do was spend a few minutes getting those measurement units figured out. I was determined to break the code.

I will blame this next bit of foolishness on a pound of butter. A pound of butter is clearly marked as 454 grams. Inside this package, each of the four sticks are said to be ½ cup or4 fluid ounces. Ergo, each fluid ounce of butter weighs 28.35 grams, coincidentally, the factor used to convert 1 ounce by weight of anything to grams. Eureka, this must mean that I can convert the weight measures in grams given in the recipes directly into liquid measures in ounces simply by dividing by 28.35.

I can handle this; I was in the math club in high school. I could practically do this math in my head, a good thing since I couldn’t find a calculator.

After two hours of ciphering and trying to remember how to divide with decimals, I had several pages of foolscap (Now I know why they call it that.) covered in chicken scratch. By my reckoning, I needed 1/3 cup of cocoa powder to give me 75 g, 1-3/4 cups of sugar to equal 400 g, and 1-1/4 cups for 275 g of flour. As I looked at the measured cocoa, I did think it seemed a bit scant, and perhaps I was finding it hard to understand how 1/3 cup of cocoa could weigh the same as say 1/3 cup of white sugar. But, those were the numbers and numbers don’t lie!           

And then as usually happens, just before I am about to do something incredibly stupid and humiliating, that voice of reason—no, not the one in my head —the voice of Jordan speaks to me: “Why don’t you just weigh the stuff?”

Huh? Do you mean actually use that adorable, robin’s-egg-blue weigh scale that I bought from a garage sale because the colour matched my blue kitchen stool and the face has a great French antique thing happening; that scale?

I weighed out my dry ingredients properly and then compared them to my calculated amounts. I suppose that this is so obvious to some of you reading this, that you must wonder how I can even manage to do laundry. The only ingredient that was close to my calculated cup measurement was the white sugar. And so I decided to try a little experiment. Since the basis of one gram unit is the weight (mass, actually) of 1 ml of water at 4ºC, only ingredients that have a similar weight as water in the same volume can be directly converted from weight to liquid volume; from grams or dry ounces to millilitres or liquid ounces.

Of course, I couldn’t let this go untested, and weighed a cup of cold water. I then weighed out a cup each of cocoa, white sugar, and flour.  The water and white sugar both weighed in at about 250 grams. Remember, we are not under ideal lab conditions here, using an antique (but attractive) scale, and a lot of convenient rounding-off! The flour weighed enough less, that I would have been short ¼ cup. Cocoa was way off at only 70 grams per cup. That could have been a baking disaster of epic proportions; all that good Guinness gone to waste.

I have learned from this little math lesson that when the recipe calls for grams, don’t muck around—use a scale! I have also learned that a 23cm pan is really a 9-inch pan and that for some reason, I have springform pans in 5 different sizes; strange for someone who declares herself a non-baker.

The cake turned out rich, dense, and moist and was a hit at the party. I might call Pete and let him know what a great book he gave me, but then again, I might not. I wouldn’t want him to think I’ve ever forgiven him the Ken-doll thing!