Ask me what to buy before you start baking properly and I’ll say digital scales, not a stand mixer. Cups and spoon measures are fine for a stew. For cakes and bread they’re guesswork, and that’s usually why a sponge comes out dense one week and fine the next.
The OXO Good Grips 11lb scale is the one I’d buy for a baker, mainly because of one clever detail. The display pulls out from the base on a little tray. Put a big mixing bowl on top and you just slide the readout forward and read it, instead of tilting the bowl or crouching down to peer under the rim.
It weighs up to 5kg in 1g steps, which is plenty for a full batch of dough in a heavy bowl. Press the zero button to reset after each ingredient and you can weigh everything into one bowl. The numbers are large with an optional backlight, and a small gauge shows how much capacity you’ve got left before you hit the limit. The top is stainless steel and wipes clean, and it’s thin enough to slide into a drawer. Four AAA batteries come in the box.
How I’d use it for a Victoria sponge, as an example:
- Put the bowl on and zero it.
- Weigh in the eggs in their shells first and note the number.
- Zero again and add the same weight of butter, then sugar, then flour, zeroing between each.
Matching everything to the eggs like that is the old trick for a sponge that rises properly, and it only works if your scale is accurate.
Where it falls short: 1g steps are fine for flour, sugar and butter, but not for a teaspoon of yeast or baking powder. Use measuring spoons for those. Also, it’s a hand-wipe job. Don’t run it under the tap.
Batteries in, bowl on, zero, weigh. Once you bake like that you won’t go back to cups. Here’s the OXO Good Grips scale with the pull-out display.
