Over the past few weeks, Mum's been doing lots of baking..

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Although things have been going fairly smoothly, her main issue is her weighing scales.
They're cheaply made and kinda old. The plastic top slides around allowing you to reset the scale to 0, then you weigh things out and prepare it for the next measurement. The issue is, the plastic slidey top bit is TOO slidey, and any movement (taking the bowl off the top and emptying it) tends to move the slidey bit around a little.
Each and every time, you need to reset it, and sometimes Mum forgets until its too late, meaning her measurements aren't always precise.

She finally gave in, and allowed me to buy her some proper digital scales.
A cheap Amazon-Basics Scale was bought, and Mum prepared to make her first recipe..

.. At which point, issue #2 cropped up.
Mum vs Metric!
Her (estimated) 45 year old cook book does include Metric measurements, but she's been sticking to the older imperial measurements for all these years.
The Amazon scales naturally reset to Metric, and she needs to toggle it over to Imperial.

Whilst showing her "Look, it's the same number, it's just different", I showed her the 8oz in her cookbook were equal to the 200g, also stated in the cookbook.
.. Except the new digital scales didn't say that.
In fact, they said that 8oz were in fact equal to 226g..
Hmm.. Something's not right, here.

So I grabbed my ipad and googled it, and .. sure enough, 8oz is 226g, not the 200g that her book said it should be.

I spent about 5 minutes flicking through various recipes in the book, and (as far as I looked) they were ALL that bad.
The "Dairy Book of Home Cookery : Revised Edition" had been written on the cusp of the Metric changeover, and obviously something had gone wrong along the way.

Another Amazon purchase was necessary. An up to date refresh of the very same book. The Dairy Book of Home Cookery, 50th Anniversary Edition is now part of Mum's arsenal, and (I checked a few!) the metric conversions now seem to be accurate.



*phew*