This comment is WILD.
They convert to mass precisely because volume changes so much with density.
my 100g of sugar will always be exactly the same as your 100g of sugar
But my 1 cup of sugar is going to be different to your 1 cup of sugar depending on how densely packed it is.
One cup of flour weighs less than one cup of sugar and different kinds of sugar also have different mass. And I rounded up or down to be in line with usual recipe amounts. But what I saw from the ranges given by helpful people here and what I found online, these vague recipes can fuck a rake. A fucking tablespoon of butter alone can be anything from 10 to 40 gram. With 14 tablespoons that gives you a range from 140g to 560g. That’s insanity.
That’s why it’s just easier to work in the original units of the recipe instead of needlessly converting it for nor real benefit. We’re making a single batch of cookies, not bread for an army or drugs; SI units and excessive precision just don’t matter that much. The recipe isn’t vague, just your understanding. A tablespoon isn’t a vague measurement, you’re just trying to adapt it to a needlessly precise unit of measure and forgetting everything your maths and sciense teachers should have taught you about significant digits.
A tablespoon as measurement for a non-fluid is extremely vague. How much mass do you pile onto it? There’s an extremely wide range of possibilities.
Also, this entire discussion under a post about how much different amounts of ingredients affect the outcome is just rich. Your recipe could be all of the examples in OP’s picture, depending on how people interpret it. If you treat baking recipes as art, sure, your recipe is great. If you want reproducible outcomes across different people it’s useless.
