You’re making chocolate chip cookies. Recipe calls for ¾ cup butter. You want to halve the recipe. Now you need ⅜ cup butter. That’s 6 tablespoons. Easy. But if you use a stick of butter (which is ½ cup), you’re making a very common mistake.
One stick of butter is ½ cup, not ⅜. That extra 2 tablespoons? That’s the difference between “chewy” and “greasy.” Your taste buds will notice. I once made that mistake. My cookies looked like little butter puddles. Delicious puddles, but still puddles.
Now think about soup. You need ¾ cup of chicken broth for a sauce. Cut to ⅜ cup. That’s 6 tablespoons of broth. Pour it in. Your soup won’t know the difference, but your sodium levels will thank you.
Half of 3/4 cup: How to measure it accurately in baking | PEKIS Recipes
The ultimate hack: just own a ⅓ cup.
Here’s a wild fact: ⅓ cup is slightly bigger than ⅜ cup. A ⅓ cup is 10 ⅔ teaspoons, while ⅜ cup is 12 teaspoons. So if you grab a ⅓ cup and add 4 teaspoons, you’ve done it. But who has time for that?
My favorite trick? Use a ¼ cup plus a 1.5 tablespoon measure. Yes, that second measure is real. It’s called a “half-ounce” measure, and it’s the nerdy cousin of the dinner spoon. Buy one. It changes lives.
Or, you know, just use a digital scale. Set it to grams, add 85 grams of whatever, and walk away a god among bakers.
