Measure & Convert
Weights, volumes and the conversions between cups and grams.
⚖Cups to Grams Converter🥣Grams to Cups Converter🥛Liquid Volume Converter📋Ingredient Weight ChartBaking maths,
weighed properly.
BakePen is a counter-top set of converters and calculators for the moments a recipe stops being instructions and starts being arithmetic — a cup that should be grams, an oven that speaks Fahrenheit, a loaf that needs to feed twice as many. Open the tool, get the number, get back to the baking. Everything runs in this page, on your device: no account, no uploads, and no recipe of yours ever leaves your kitchen.
- No account
- Nothing uploaded
- Works offline once loaded
Cups to grams — try it
250 g
That little calculation — one ingredient, one honest density — is the whole idea of this site, repeated twenty ways.
Categories
Five shelves, twenty tools
A yeast converter and a cake timer have nothing in common except a kitchen, so they do not share a drawer. Each shelf below holds the four tools that belong together, and each tool does exactly one job.
Ingredients
One ingredient at a time, converted properly.
🧈Butter Converter🌾Flour Converter🍬Sugar Converter🍞Yeast ConverterRecipes & Planning
Scale it, cost it, write it down, shop for it.
📐Recipe Scaler🧾Recipe Cost Calculator🗂Recipe Card Maker🛒Grocery List MakerDough & Baking Science
Percentages, hydration, eggs and leavening.
💧Dough Hydration Calculator%Baker's Percentage Calculator🥚Egg Size Converter🫧Leavening Substitute CalculatorOven & Kitchen
Temperatures, pans, timers and servings.
🌡Oven Temperature Converter🍰Baking Pan Converter⏲Kitchen Timer🍽Serving CalculatorReading the shelves
What each shelf is really for
The categories are not decoration. Each one answers a different kind of question that turns up while baking, and knowing which shelf your question lives on is usually half of solving it.
Measure & Convert — the translation shelf
Recipes cross borders badly. An American blog measures flour in cups, a British book in grams, a French one in millilitres and centilitres, and an Australian one in 20 ml tablespoons that quietly differ from everyone else's. This shelf exists to translate between those worlds without rounding your bake into a different bake.
The shelf's working rule is that a volume is never converted with a single universal number. Flour, sugar and cocoa get their own densities because they genuinely have them; the converters here carry those densities openly and show their working, so when your own scale disagrees with a chart by a few grams you can see which side of the average your bag of flour sits on and adjust with your eyes open.
Ingredients — one at a time, in depth
Some ingredients are converted so often, and so badly by generic charts, that they earn a page of their own. Butter arrives in sticks, blocks, cups and tablespoons depending on which side of an ocean wrote the recipe. Flour changes density with its protein content. Sugar is four different ingredients wearing one name. Yeast is three products of different strengths sharing a job title.
Each page on this shelf takes one of those ingredients and does it completely: the conversions, the traps (packed versus sifted, melted versus softened, fresh versus dried), and the point at which the conversion stops mattering. If a generic chart has ever given you a suspiciously round number for butter, this shelf is the correction.
Recipes & Planning — before anything is baked
Most baking failures are decided before the oven is even on: the batch sized wrong for the tin, the ingredient that was never bought, the cost guessed instead of counted. This shelf is the paperwork of baking, done properly and quickly — scaling a recipe by servings or by a factor, pricing it ingredient by ingredient, writing it onto a card that survives a floury kitchen, and turning it into a shopping list that survives the supermarket.
Nothing here asks for an account or keeps your recipes. The card maker and list maker format what you type, on your device, into something printable — because a recipe that lives only in a browser tab is a recipe you will lose mid-bake.
Dough & Baking Science — the percentages shelf
Bread bakers write recipes differently from everyone else: flour is 100%, and water, salt and yeast are shares of it. That single idea — baker's percentages — plus its close relative hydration, is how a formula for one loaf becomes a formula for forty without changing the bread. This shelf holds the calculators for that way of working, and the two ingredient questions that sit beside it in almost every dough: how much leavening you actually have, and what your eggs weigh.
These are also the tools where the site shows its working most openly, because dough is unforgiving of hidden assumptions. A starter, for instance, is half flour and half water, and any hydration figure that ignores it is wrong by exactly that much.
Oven & Kitchen — heat, tins and time
The last shelf is the physical one: the oven's four dialects of temperature (Fahrenheit, Celsius, Gas Mark and the unmarked fifth one, the fan setting), the pan in your cupboard versus the pan in the recipe, the several clocks a bake day runs on at once, and the oldest catering question of all — how much cake a crowd actually eats.
Nothing on this shelf pretends to more precision than the kitchen allows. Pan conversions keep batter depth constant because depth, not width, is what governs a bake; temperature conversions give the fan adjustment alongside because that is the figure home ovens actually need; and the serving calculator plans with the portions caterers really cut, not the portions cookbooks politely assume.
A good conversion does one thing: it hands you back the recipe its author meant to give you.
On the counter
Eight tools, opened up
Most visits here need one of these eight. Each card below is the tool itself in miniature: what it does, a taste of its output, how the number is arrived at, and — printed on every card, because it matters — where that tool’s reliability ends.
⚖measure
Cups to Grams Converter
The most-used page on this site exists because "a cup of flour" is not a weight — it is a volume that different hands fill differently, of an ingredient whose density is only about half that of sugar. Give this converter the ingredient and the cups, and it multiplies by the density measured for that ingredient, not by a one-size figure borrowed from flour.
The difference is not small. Two cups of plain flour are 250 g; two cups of granulated sugar are 400 g; two cups of icing sugar are 240 g. A chart that uses one number for all three is wrong twice out of three times, and the bakes that fail "for no reason" are very often this page’s arithmetic done badly by somebody else.
2 cups plain flour250 g
2 cups granulated sugar400 g
2 cups cocoa powder200 g
How it works. Each ingredient carries a grams-per-cup density arrived at by weighing repeated spooned-and-levelled cups and averaging them, then checking the average against the standard references home bakers already trust. Where sources disagreed, the middle figure won and the size of the disagreement is what the tool page’s notes describe.
The honest limit: your flour is not the average flour. A scooped cup can run 20–30 g heavy, and humidity shifts things further. The converter removes the chart’s error, not the kitchen’s — weighing the first cup once, in your kitchen, with your flour, calibrates everything after it.
Open tool →
🌡oven
Oven Temperature Converter
Recipes publish temperatures in whichever scale their country uses, and ovens accept only one of them. This converter reads Fahrenheit, Celsius or Gas Mark and answers in all of them at once — with the fan-oven setting printed beside the conventional one, because fan ovens run effectively hotter and the 20 °C adjustment is the single most common cause of a first batch browning too fast.
It also handles the bottom of the scale properly. Gas Marks below 1 are quarter marks — a quarter, a half — and slow bakes like meringues and rich fruit cakes live down there, where one mark is the difference between drying and cooking.
350 °F175 °C
Gas Mark4
Fan oven155 °C
How it works. The arithmetic is the standard one: Fahrenheit and Celsius convert exactly, Gas Mark is derived from the conventional scale at roughly 13.9 °C per mark above Gas 1, and the fan figure applies the widely used 20 °C reduction.
No chart can tell you what your oven is actually doing. Dials drift, hot spots move, and a ten-year-old oven can run 15 °C proud of its setting. For precision work the converter gets you to the right setting; an oven thermometer tells you whether the oven obeyed.
Open tool →
📐recipe
Recipe Scaler
Halving a recipe in your head while butter melts is how 100 g of sugar becomes 200. The scaler holds the whole ingredient list and multiplies every line by one factor — from servings (the recipe makes 8, you need 12) or from a factor you state outright — and shows the original and scaled amounts side by side so each line can be checked before a single bowl comes out.
It is deliberately indifferent to what the ingredients are: weights, volumes, counts of eggs, tins of tomatoes. One factor, applied evenly, is what "the same recipe, bigger" means.
Plain flour 250 g→ 375 g
Caster sugar 200 g→ 300 g
Eggs 2→ 3
How it works. Plain, auditable multiplication with no hidden rounding: results are shown to one decimal place so that 0.5 of an egg is visible as a decision to make (weigh beaten egg) rather than being silently rounded away.
Scaling cannot change physics. A deeper batter bakes slower and often wants a slightly lower temperature, and very large batches sometimes need a touch less leavening. Scale the ingredients here; then check the pan converter before you commit the tin.
Open tool →
💧dough
Dough Hydration Calculator
Hydration decides whether a dough pours, stretches or stands up — and it is the figure home bakers most often get wrong, because the flour and water inside a sourdough starter are easy to forget. This calculator counts them. Tell it the main flour and water, how much starter you are adding and how wet that starter is, and it returns the dough’s true overall hydration.
The correction is not trivial: 100 g of a 100%-hydration starter is 50 g of flour and 50 g of water, enough to move a stiff dough’s hydration by several points and turn a puzzling bake into an explained one.
Flour 500 g · Water 320 g
Starter 100 g at 100%
True hydration67.3%
How it works. Starter is split into flour and water by its own hydration percentage, both halves are added to the main dough, and hydration is then water divided by flour across the whole formula — the definition bread bakers actually use.
Hydration is a guide, not a destiny: strong bread flour drinks more than soft flour, and wholemeal more than either. Two doughs at 70% can handle completely differently, which the calculator cannot know — it gives you the true number to start from.
Open tool →
%dough
Baker's Percentage Calculator
Professional bakers write recipes as percentages of the flour, which makes a formula size-independent: write 70% water, 2% salt and 1% yeast once, and it is equally correct for 400 g of flour or 40 kg. This calculator runs the system in the useful direction — give it a flour weight and the percentages, and it returns every ingredient in grams plus the total dough weight.
The total matters more than it looks. It is how you know whether a batch fits your tins, how you divide it evenly, and how you spot, at a glance, that a formula you found online has a salt percentage that will make the loaf inedible.
Flour 1,000 g (100%)
Water 70%700 g
Salt 2% · Yeast 1%20 g · 10 g
Total dough1,730 g
How it works. Simple share-of-flour arithmetic, displayed as a table in the order bakers read formulas. Percentages can be changed line by line, so developing a recipe — a point more water, a touch less sugar — is a single edit rather than a re-weighing.
Percentages describe a formula, not a schedule. They say nothing about fermentation time, dough temperature or flour strength, and a perfect set of percentages mixed at the wrong temperature still misses. Treat the output as the recipe’s skeleton.
Open tool →
🍰oven
Baking Pan Converter
A batter does not care what shape a tin is; it cares how deep it sits. This converter holds the base area and working depth of the pans home bakers actually own — rounds from 15 to 25 cm, squares, loaves, a springform, a bundt, a muffin tin — and works out the single multiplier that keeps batter depth, and therefore baking behaviour, the same when you change pans.
Every ingredient scales by that multiplier, and the page tells you plainly when the new pan holds enough more (or less) that the baking time, not just the quantities, needs a second thought.
20 cm round → 23 cm square
Batter multiplier× 1.35
How it works. A volume comparison: base area multiplied by depth for both pans, ratio taken. Depth is held near-constant in the pan data deliberately, because a deeper layer changes a bake far more than a wider one does.
Fill any tin more than two-thirds and no multiplier will save you. Very shallow conversions — a cake batter into a wide tray — bake so much faster that the converter’s timing note, not its number, is the part to read twice.
Open tool →
🍞ingredient
Yeast Converter
Fresh yeast, instant yeast and active dry yeast are the same organism at three different concentrations, and recipes rarely say which one their author used. This converter moves between the three with the ratios bread books rely on — fresh divided by three for instant, by two and a half for active dry — and shows all three amounts side by side, in grams, with instant also given in teaspoons for small batches.
It settles the most common substitution question in bread baking in about four seconds, which is roughly how long a dough gives you before the moment passes.
Fresh 21 g= Instant 7 g
Fresh 21 g= Active dry 8.4 g
How it works. Fixed, published conversion ratios applied cleanly, with the results table ordered the way substitutions are usually needed: what you have at the top, what replaces it underneath.
Ratios assume lively yeast. A jar of instant that has sat open for a year, or fresh yeast at the end of its life, will underperform its arithmetic — proofing active dry first, and watching the dough rather than the clock, covers what a converter cannot.
Open tool →
🧾recipe
Recipe Cost Calculator
Nobody knows what their baking costs, because flour is bought by the kilo and used by the hundredweight-of-grams. This calculator prices a recipe the way it is actually consumed: each ingredient at pack price, charged for the fraction of the pack the recipe used, plus a line for the extras everyone forgets — energy, cases, a box — divided honestly by the servings it makes.
The per-serving figure it lands on is the one you need before a bake sale, a market stall, or the moment a friend offers to "at least pay for the ingredients" and you have to name a number that is true.
Flour 500 g of a 1 kg bag0.60
Butter 200 g of a 250 g block1.68
Whole bake · per sliceshown on the tool
How it works. Straight proportional costing: used amount divided by pack size, multiplied by pack price, summed across ingredients, extras added, total divided by servings. No hidden assumptions, and every intermediate line stays visible so a wrong pack size is easy to spot.
Ingredient cost is a floor, not a price. It excludes your time, your oven’s wear, packaging beyond what you enter, and the bakes that fail — all of which belong on top before anything is sold. The calculator keeps you honest about the floor; pricing above it is your business decision.
Open tool →
Anatomy
Every tool page is built the same way
Twenty tools would be a lot to learn if each behaved differently. They do not. Open any tool on this site and you will find the same three parts in the same order, so the second tool you ever use is already familiar.
01
The settings
Everything the tool needs from you, in one panel, in the order you would naturally supply it: the ingredient before the amount, the pan you have before the pan you want. Nothing is hidden behind a second screen, and nothing at all stands between you and the first input — no sign-up wall, no cookie banner to dismiss, no wizard. The defaults are real, usable values, so the page demonstrates itself before you touch it.
02
The answer
The result, large, in a monospace figure you can read at arm’s length with floury hands, updating the moment any setting changes. Underneath it sits a short note in plain words: what assumption the figure rests on, what it means in spoons or minutes or slices, or what to watch out for. An answer without its assumption is only half an answer, and the notes are where this site keeps the other half.
03
The working
Beside the tool, a plain-language account of the method — the density table behind a conversion, the volume arithmetic behind a pan swap, the ratio behind a yeast substitution — and the point at which the method stops being dependable. Most tool pages on the internet hide this part. Here it is considered the most useful third of the page, because a baker who can see the working can bend a tool to a recipe it was not quite designed for.
One more consistency is worth naming: every tool finishes in the browser you already have open. There is no app to install, no file to download, and — because the calculations are small — no wait. The page in front of you is the whole machine.
In practice
Whole bakes, start to finish
Nobody opens a converter for its own sake. They are halfway through something — a recipe in the wrong units, a tin in the wrong size, a crowd of unknown appetite. These are the three runs that bring most people here, written out in the order they actually happen.
An American recipe, a metric kitchen
The recipe is in cups, your scale is in grams, and the butter is already softening. One pass, three tools, in this order:
- Cups to Grams Converteringredient by ingredient — flour first, because it is the line with the most room for error
- Butter Converterfor the "1½ sticks" line that no cup conversion handles cleanly
- Oven Temperature Converterlast, for the 350 that is not a temperature in your oven’s language — 175 °C, Gas 4, 155 fan
The tin you own is not the tin in the book
The recipe wants a 20 cm round; your cupboard offers a 23 cm square and confidence. Depth decides whether this works, and the order protects it:
- Baking Pan Converterone multiplier (here ×1.35) that keeps the batter the same depth in the bigger tin
- Recipe Scalerapply exactly that multiplier to every ingredient line, eggs included, before anything is weighed
- Kitchen Timerset for five minutes short of the book’s time — a wider, slightly shallower bake finishes early
Saturday bread, scaled to the house
A formula written for one loaf has to become three for a family weekend, and the starter in the fridge is part of the maths whether you count it or not:
- Baker’s Percentage Calculatorturn the formula’s percentages into grams at the new flour weight, total dough and all
- Dough Hydration Calculatorcheck the true hydration with your starter included, before the first mix, not after
- Yeast Converterbecause the recipe says fresh, the shelf says instant, and the dough will not wait
Worked examples
The arithmetic, shown
Three calculations this site does daily, written out longhand once, so you can see there is no sleight of hand anywhere in the machinery.
Converting a whole recipe, line by line
A muffin recipe lists 2½ cups plain flour, ¾ cup caster sugar, ½ cup cocoa and 1 cup milk. Flour converts at 125 g a cup, caster sugar at 225 g, cocoa at 100 g, and milk — a liquid — at 245 g for the cup, treated as 240 ml. Multiplied out, the dry bowl is 312 g of flour, 169 g of sugar and 50 g of cocoa, and the jug holds 240 ml of milk. Weighed in that order, the conversion takes under a minute and the muffins come out as their author intended rather than as the cup drawer decided.
2.5 × 125 = 312 g flour · 0.75 × 225 = 169 g sugar · 0.5 × 100 = 50 g cocoa
True hydration, with the starter counted
A dough mixes 500 g of flour and 320 g of water, then takes 100 g of starter at 100% hydration. Ignoring the starter gives 320 ÷ 500 = 64% — and a dough that feels far wetter than 64% should. The starter is 50 g of flour and 50 g of water wearing a trench coat, so the honest sums are 370 g of water over 550 g of flour: 67.3%. Those three points are the difference between a dough that matches its description and one that mysteriously does not.
(320 + 50) ÷ (500 + 50) = 370 ÷ 550 = 67.3% hydration
What a market-stall slice really costs
A fruit loaf uses 500 g of flour from a 1 kg bag bought for 1.20 (cost: 0.60), 200 g of butter from a 250 g block at 2.10 (cost: 1.68), 250 g of sugar from a kilo at 1.10 (cost: 0.28), fruit, yeast and salt for another 0.90, and 0.35 of oven energy. The loaf costs 3.81 to make and cuts into ten slices: 0.38 a slice in ingredients and energy, before time, packaging or the loaf that did not rise. Every honest price a home baker charges starts from a sum exactly like this one.
0.60 + 1.68 + 0.28 + 0.90 + 0.35 = 3.81 per loaf · ÷ 10 slices = 0.38
Limits
Where each tool stops
A converter that claims certainty is selling something. These are the honest edges of the eight featured tools — the point past which the number stays right and the bake becomes yours again.
- Cups to Grams Converter
- It converts the average cup, not yours. Density is a property of an ingredient handled a particular way — spooned flour and scooped flour are, by weight, two different ingredients that share a name. The chart pins down everything except your hand, and on a recipe where 20 g decides the outcome, weighing one cup of your own flour once and comparing it with the chart tells you more than any second chart would.
- Oven Temperature Converter
- It converts the setting, not the oven. The conversion between Fahrenheit, Celsius and Gas Mark is exact arithmetic; the temperature inside a specific oven at that setting is not, and the two routinely differ by 10–20 °C in older appliances. The fan adjustment it prints is the standard rule of thumb, and individual fan ovens vary around it. Precision bakes deserve an oven thermometer.
- Recipe Scaler
- It scales ingredients, not time, temperature or judgement. A doubled batter in a deeper vessel bakes through more slowly than the original, and a halved one faster; leavening and salt percentages occasionally want a small human adjustment at extreme factors. The tool keeps the proportions perfect and says so; everything downstream of the mixing bowl stays the baker’s call.
- Yeast Converter
- It converts quantities, not vitality. The ratios assume yeast that is alive and reasonably fresh. Yeast that has sat open for months, or been stored warm, will raise dough at a fraction of its rated strength at any quantity the converter names — proofing it first, where the type allows, is the check the arithmetic cannot do for you.
- Baking Pan Converter
- It matches volume, not shape. A bundt’s centre tube, a loaf pan’s steep sides and a traybake’s wide surface all change heat flow in ways a volume ratio flattens away. The conversion gets the quantity right so the depth is right; unusual geometries still want a watchful eye and a first check five minutes early.
- Dough Hydration Calculator
- It reports the percentage, not the feel. Flour absorbs water at rates that vary with protein, milling and how much of the grain is in it, so two doughs at identical hydration can be a soft batter’s width apart in the hand. Use the number to compare your doughs with each other and with published formulas — that comparison is where its value lives.
- Recipe Cost Calculator
- It counts ingredients and the extras you remember to type. It does not know your time’s worth, your market’s tolerance, or the cost of the bakes that failed on the way to the good one. Sold baking priced from this figure alone is priced at cost, which is a way of working for nothing at scale.
- Kitchen Timer
- It keeps time only while its tab lives. Close the page and the timers close with it; a phone that sleeps its browser can silence the alert. For anything expensive in the oven, let it run alongside — not instead of — whatever timer you already trust.
The longer version — averages, warranties and where advice ends — lives on the disclaimer page.
Choosing
Picking between lookalikes
Four pairs of tools here get mistaken for each other weekly. Each pair shares most of its machinery; the difference is the job you walked in with, and the separating question is printed under each pair.
Cups to grams, or grams to cups?
Cups to Grams Converter
Starts from a recipe written in cups and lands on your scale: the direction of travel for most imported recipes.
Grams to Cups Converter
Starts from grams and lands in cups, for kitchens without a scale or cookbooks written the other way round.
Ask which side of the recipe you are standing on. The ingredient densities are identical both ways, so the two pages are round-trip consistent — convert there and back and you return to your starting number.
Scaler, or pan converter first?
Recipe Scaler
Multiplies a whole ingredient list by one factor, whatever the reason for changing the size.
Baking Pan Converter
Works out what that factor should be when the reason is a different tin: the multiplier that keeps batter depth constant.
Changing pans? Converter first, scaler second, in that order, every time. The pan page exists to choose the number; the scaler exists to apply it to all twelve lines without a slip on line nine.
Hydration, or baker’s percentage?
Dough Hydration Calculator
One number: total water as a share of total flour, starter included — the figure that describes how a dough will handle.
Baker’s Percentage Calculator
The whole formula at once: every ingredient as a share of flour, turned into grams at your batch size.
Describing a dough you have? Hydration. Building or resizing a formula? Percentages. They are the same arithmetic seen from two ends, and serious bread work uses both in the same session.
Butter converter, or the weight chart?
Butter Converter
Nothing but butter, in every unit it is sold and specified in — sticks included — laid out in a single table.
Ingredient Weight Chart
Every common ingredient’s grams-per-cup, one at a time, for quick lookups while a recipe is open.
Butter is the chart’s most-hit row and its fiddliest unit, so it graduated to its own page. Anything else, the chart is faster; butter, in sticks, the dedicated page wins.
Reference
The two tables behind half the site
Converters are only as good as their tables, so the tables are published. The first is the density basis of every cup conversion here — grams per US cup, with the tablespoon and teaspoon figures the small-amount pages derive from it. The second is the temperature ladder, fan settings included, that the oven converter reads from.
| Ingredient | 1 cup | 1 tablespoon | 1 teaspoon |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plain flour | 125 g | 200 g | 80 g |
| Bread flour | 127 g | 203 g | 81 g |
| Cake flour | 114 g | 182 g | 73 g |
| Granulated sugar | 200 g | 320 g | 113 g |
| Caster sugar | 225 g | 360 g | 127 g |
| Brown sugar, packed | 220 g | 352 g | 124 g |
| Icing sugar | 120 g | 192 g | 68 g |
| Butter | 227 g | 363 g | 128 g |
| Cocoa powder | 100 g | 160 g | 57 g |
| Honey | 340 g | 544 g | 192 g |
| Rolled oats | 90 g | 144 g | 51 g |
| Chocolate chips | 170 g | 272 g | 96 g |
A tablespoon here is a sixteenth of the same cup the density came from, and a teaspoon a forty-eighth — the values are the cup figure divided, not separately measured, which is why they stay consistent with the converters. Brown sugar is packed; everything else is spooned into the cup and levelled. Australian tablespoons hold 20 ml rather than 15, so spoon measures from Australian recipes carry a built-in third extra that no table can remove for you — weigh, where it matters.
| Fahrenheit | Celsius | Gas Mark | Fan | Typically used for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 225 °F | 110 °C | ¼ | 90 °C | Very slow — meringues, drying |
| 250 °F | 120 °C | ½ | 100 °C | Very slow — rich fruit cake |
| 300 °F | 150 °C | 2 | 130 °C | Slow — custards, cheesecakes |
| 325 °F | 165 °C | 3 | 145 °C | Moderately slow — sponges |
| 350 °F | 175 °C | 4 | 155 °C | Moderate — most cakes |
| 375 °F | 190 °C | 5 | 170 °C | Moderately hot — biscuits |
| 400 °F | 200 °C | 6 | 180 °C | Hot — pastry, roast bakes |
| 425 °F | 220 °C | 7 | 200 °C | Hot — pizza, bread crusts |
| 450 °F | 230 °C | 8 | 210 °C | Very hot — flatbreads |
Fan figures apply the standard 20 °C reduction to the conventional setting. Below Gas Mark 1 the steps are quarter marks and the Celsius figures are the conventional roundings used by manufacturers, which is why the bottom of this ladder is best treated as "low and slow" rather than a laboratory value.
How it is built
Built like a kitchen tool, not a funnel
- 📄
One page, one job
There is no dashboard, no project file and no onboarding. A tool is a page that answers its one question, shows its working, and is done. If a page on this site ever asks you to set something up before it calculates anything, it has failed its own rule.
- ⚡
Fast because there is less of it
No framework, no bundler, no analytics script, no chat bubble in the corner. The pages are hand-written HTML, CSS and plain JavaScript with self-hosted fonts, so a tool is usable the moment it appears and still works if you save it to your device and open it with the internet off.
- 🔒
Nothing to sign into
Your recipes are yours. Nothing typed into a scaler, a cost calculator or a card maker is transmitted anywhere — there is no server on the other end to transmit it to. The recipes stay in the tab, and when the tab closes, they are gone, which is exactly how long a website should remember your baking.
CtrlK
Opens from any page on the site, and closes on Esc.
Every tool is two keys away
The search palette covers all twenty tools and their categories. Type "grams", "gas mark", "starter" or "party" and it narrows as you type; the arrow keys move through what is left and Enter opens it. On a phone, the Search button in the header opens the same box. It behaves identically on the homepage, on tool pages and inside articles, so the shortcut you learn once works everywhere on the site.
Missing
What is not on this site yet — or ever
The gaps are part of the design document. Some are waiting for a way to do them properly; a few have been considered and refused, and the refusals are recorded here too so they are not mistaken for oversights.
Recipe storage and accounts — deliberately, not eventually. Saving your recipes here would need accounts and a database, and both would undo the privacy the site is built on. The card maker prints; paper and your own notes app are the archive.
Nutrition calculation — working out calories or macros needs a food database whose entries vary enormously by brand, and a confident-looking figure built on the wrong entry is worse than none. The cost calculator is honest arithmetic; a nutrition figure would be a guess wearing a uniform.
Cup measures for every ingredient on earth — the chart covers the ingredients home bakers convert weekly, measured properly. Extending it to hundreds of ingredients nobody weighed would pad the table with borrowed numbers of unknown origin, which is how bad charts are made. Requests for specific ingredients are read and measured.
Print-perfect recipe importing — pasting a recipe from another website and having it parsed automatically sounds lovely and fails on the second recipe, because recipe pages share no common structure. Typing into the scaler takes a minute and works every time.
Altitude-perfect conversions — high-altitude baking changes leavening, liquids and timings together, in ways that depend on the recipe. A single altitude slider would pretend otherwise. The blog covers altitude adjustments honestly, as a set of judgement calls, instead.
A timer that survives closing the tab — browser timers live and die with their page, and pretending otherwise would cost somebody a cake. The kitchen timer says so on its own card above rather than discovering it with you.
If one of these is the thing you came for, say so via the contact page — the order tools get built in here has always been set by what bakers actually ask for.
Glossary
Words the tools assume
Fourteen terms do heavy lifting across this site. They are defined here once, in the senses the tools use them, so a figure never rests on a word you had to guess at.
- Baker’s percentage
- Every ingredient expressed as a share of the flour weight, with flour itself fixed at 100%. The notation that makes a recipe any size without changing its character.
- Hydration
- Total water as a percentage of total flour in a dough, including both halves of a starter. The single number that best predicts how a dough handles.
- Density (of an ingredient)
- How much a level cup of it weighs. The hidden variable in every volume-to-weight conversion, and the reason one chart cannot serve all ingredients.
- Packed
- Brown sugar’s measuring instruction: pressed firmly into the cup until it holds the cup’s shape when turned out. Worth about 50 g a cup against the same sugar loose.
- Spooned and levelled
- The standard way to fill a measuring cup with a dry ingredient: spoon it in, then sweep a knife across the top. The basis for every density figure on this site.
- Gas Mark
- The British oven scale, roughly 13.9 °C per mark in its working range, with quarter marks at the low end where slow baking lives.
- Fan adjustment
- The reduction — conventionally 20 °C — applied to a recipe’s temperature when baking in a fan or convection oven, which heats more aggressively at the same setting.
- Levain / starter
- A fermented flour-and-water culture used to raise dough. For calculation purposes it is flour and water in a known ratio, and it counts in hydration sums.
- Scaling
- Multiplying every ingredient in a recipe by the same factor to change the yield while keeping the proportions — and therefore the bake — the same.
- Crumb
- The interior texture of a baked item: its holes, softness and structure. Not the crust’s opposite so much as its whole reason for existing.
- Proof / prove
- The final rise of shaped dough before baking; also, testing whether yeast is alive by watching it foam in warm water. Context decides which your recipe means.
- Bench time
- A rest given to dough or pastry partway through shaping, letting gluten relax so it can be rolled or portioned without fighting back.
- Carryover
- The rise in internal temperature that continues after something leaves the oven, and the extra setting of custards, caramels and sponges as they cool.
- Substitution ratio
- The fixed proportion at which one ingredient replaces another — 3:1 fresh-to-instant yeast, roughly 4:1 powder-to-soda — valid only inside the context the ratio came from.
Questions
The short answers
Do my recipes or amounts get uploaded anywhere?
No. There is no server component to BakePen: the tools are pages that calculate in your own browser. A recipe typed into the scaler or the card maker exists only in that tab, which you can verify in your browser’s network tools — while you use any tool here, nothing is sent. It is also why the site cannot offer to remember your recipes for next time.
Why did my converted flour weight come out different from another website’s?
Because flour has no single true grams-per-cup. Depending on the flour, the brand and whether the cup was spooned or scooped, honest sources land anywhere between about 120 g and 130 g for plain flour. This site uses 125 g, spooned and levelled, and says so on the tool. Two charts disagreeing by a few grams are both describing real cups; a difference of 30 g or more means one of them is describing a scooped cup or a different flour.
Should I weigh or measure in cups?
Weigh, whenever the bake matters — a scale removes the largest single source of variation in home baking, which is the hand filling the cup. Cups are fine for forgiving bakes and for liquids, and this site exists partly to make cups as accurate as they can be when a scale is not available. But the direction of travel for anyone who bakes weekly is a scale that reads in grams, and every converter here is a bridge toward it.
My oven has no Gas Mark and the recipe only gives one. What do I set?
Convert the Gas Mark to Celsius with the oven converter, then check whether your oven is a fan model. If it is, use the fan figure the converter prints alongside — typically 20 °C below the conventional setting. For Gas Marks below 1, treat the result as approximate and favour the gentler end: slow bakes forgive a few degrees low far more readily than a few degrees high.
Can I double a cake recipe exactly?
The ingredients, yes — the scaler exists for it. The bake, not quite: a doubled mixture needs a pan that holds it at the same depth (the pan converter’s job), and a deeper or fuller pan changes the time and sometimes wants a slightly lower temperature. Double the leavening exactly at normal factors; at three times and beyond, taste and experience sometimes trim it slightly, which is a judgement call the tools deliberately leave to you.
Why does the site count my sourdough starter in hydration?
Because it is flour and water, and leaving it out misstates the dough. A 100 g starter at 100% hydration contributes 50 g of each, which can move a loaf’s overall hydration by three or more percentage points — enough to explain a dough that handles nothing like its written percentage. Any hydration figure that excludes the starter is measuring a dough that does not exist.
Are the conversions here suitable for professional use?
The arithmetic is, and many of the reference figures come from professional practice — baker’s percentages, catering portion counts. What the site cannot do is certify a figure for your kitchen, your ingredients or your jurisdiction’s rules on weights, labelling or food safety. Professionals are welcome to the tools; the responsibility for a sold product stays, properly, with the professional.
What does the recipe cost calculator leave out?
Your time, mostly — deliberately. It totals ingredients at pack prices plus the extras you type in, because those are knowable. A selling price also needs labour, packaging, market fees and something for failures, and those numbers differ so much between a school fair and a farmers’ market that printing a single "profit" figure would be inventing precision. The tool gives the true floor; what stands on it is your decision.
Why is there no app?
Because the tools are pages, and pages already do everything an app would do here: they load instantly, work offline once loaded, and ask for no permissions, no storage on your phone and no updates. An app would add an install step and a privacy policy of its own to protect data this site never collects in the first place.
The timer stopped when my phone slept. Is that a bug?
It is a browser behaviour rather than a bug: timers on a web page pause when the device puts the page to sleep, and no website can override your phone’s power settings. The kitchen timer is built for a laptop or tablet on the counter, or a phone kept awake with the page open — and its limits are printed on the homepage precisely so nobody learns this from a burnt bake.
Can I suggest an ingredient for the weight chart, or a new tool?
Yes — the contact page is read, and both lists grow from requests. An ingredient gets added after it has been weighed properly, in several brands, rather than copied from another chart; that takes longer and is why the chart covers dozens of ingredients well instead of hundreds approximately. Tool requests that are one page, one job, and need no account stand the best chance of being built.
Does the site work in grams only, or can I stay imperial?
Both, by design. Every weight tool shows ounces alongside grams, temperatures always show Fahrenheit with Celsius, and the converters run in both directions. The site itself has no flag to fly in the units argument; it simply refuses to let a recipe’s units be the reason a bake fails.
Start with the recipe in front of you.
Whatever it is written in — cups, Fahrenheit, sticks, Gas Mark — there is a page here that speaks its language. Pick the tool, take the number, and get back to the part that smells good.
Browse the tools Try the recipe scaler