Rescues · TO MEASURE
Bread dough is consistently too stiff and dry.
Why it happens
Flour scooped rather than spooned. The extra ten percent is invisible in the cup and unmistakable in the dough.
Recovering it
A dough that came out stiff can be corrected with water, a spoonful at a time, until it feels right — which is the real argument for learning what the dough should feel like rather than trusting the number. A batter already in the tin cannot be corrected. For anything where the ratio matters, the durable fix is a scale: it costs almost nothing, removes the whole class of error, and means a recipe behaves the same every time.
The mechanism
A measuring cup measures space, not substance, so it is only reliable for things whose density does not change. Water and oil are consistent to within a percent or two. Flour is not: the same cup can hold 110 g scooped straight from the bag and packed, or 125 g spooned in and levelled, a difference of over ten percent that shows up directly in a dough's hydration. Brown sugar varies more still, depending entirely on how hard it was pressed. This is why baking recipes that matter give weights and cooking recipes usually do not — a stew is forgiving of ten percent more onion, and a bread is not. Small volumes are the exception in the other direction: a quarter teaspoon of yeast is beyond the resolution of any domestic scale, so spoons win there.
The full TO MEASURE lesson — how to tell, where to practise it, what it carries to.