How To Use Baking Ratios

If you remember the ratios for the basic baking recipes, you can bake almost anything. Recipes can be very difficult to remember, but ratios are generally more memorable and often work out to a formula that is easy to memorize and use to scale up or down. 

I have written a whole ebook on how to scale recipes up and down, how to use ratios and do the math, and I even have a workbook that has a plug-and-play format where you fill in your recipes and a conversion factor for scaling recipes up and down. You can read more about the bundle here. I highly recommend the bundle if you like to take recipes and modify the batch size or yield, or if you like to take cake recipes and bake them in different sizes of pans.

Jump to:

• Why Work With Ratios
• How To Calculate Ratios
• A Few Basic Baking Ratios To Remember
• Other Useful Baking Ratios
• Resources To Help You Bake With Ratios
• Need more help with baking conversions?

Why Work With Ratios

Whenever I come across a new baking recipe that intrigues me, I always try to work out the ratio to see if this "new to me" recipe fits into a ratio that I am already familiar with. It's a method of dissecting a recipe to understand what makes it tick. It's also a way to learn how recipe writers deviate from the basics to create new recipes. 

In baking, it's very difficult to reinvent cake or cookie recipes because at their core, the amount of each ingredient relative to each other tend to be quite standard yielding consistent taste and texture. Mess with the ratio of ingredients and you risk throwing off the recipe, yielding cookies that spread too thin when baked or are too dry or crispy, for example.

With cake recipes, if you have a basic vanilla layer cake recipe that you like and you want to adapt it to make it lemon-flavoured, you can't just add lemon juice to the recipe and expect the same results, even if the result will indeed be lemon-flavoured. Too much liquid in a cake can lead to a gummy or wet texture that is impossible to bake through properly. To incorporate lemon juice into a recipe without any, you must take away one liquid ingredient and replace it with the juice.

The same goes for frostings: if you like Italian meringue buttercream and want to turn the vanilla buttercream into an orange buttercream, you can't just add orange juice. The orange juice will likely throw off the delicate balance and cause the buttercream to break (curdle). You will break the emulsion: the solid fat may separate from the liquid. It would be impossible to fix at that point. Think of how delicate the balance is between butter, cream cheese and icing sugar in cream cheese frosting!

To work with ratios and get creative, you need to understand the roles of the ingredients used in baking and what each ingredient contributes to a recipe. You're also going to have to get very familiar with the ins and outs of baking substitutions. The good news is that baking is pretty logical, and once you understand the ingredients, the techniques, and the ratios, you can pretty much create anything you want, with a little dose of experimenting to perfect your final product.

How To Calculate Ratios

A ratio is a fraction, so ratios would have come up in math class as the mathematical relationship of one relative to another: a 1-to-1 ratio can be written as 1:1, or 50/50, and we know that works out to equal parts. Another way to express a ratio is with percentages, so 1:1 is equivalent to 50 % of each ingredient. And each portion represents half of the whole, i.e., the fraction ½ or 0.5, which translates to 50% of the whole. Clearly, I'd make a terrible math teacher, but hopefully you get my point...

When you want to calculate ratios, you divide all the components by the same number, usually the smallest number of the recipe. The goal is to bring the components down to the smallest whole numbers they can be. Here are some examples of how to calculate recipe ratios:

• If I tell you a shortbread recipe is 115 grams of sugar, 230 grams of butter, and 345 grams of flour, I divide all the quantities by 115 grams, which leaves you with 1 of sugar, 2 of butter, and 3 of flour. The ratio is 1:2:3, by weight.
• If I tell you the cake is made with 2 cups of butter, 4 cups of sugar, 6 cups of flour: divide all the numbers by 2 cups and you end up with 1 of butter, 2 of sugar, 3 of flour. That's a 1:2:3 ratio, by volume.
• If I tell you the biscuits are made with a recipe that is 60 grams of butter, 120 grams of milk, and 180 grams of flour, divide all the quantities by 60 grams, and you end up with a ratio of 1:2:3, by weight.

Note: when working with ratios, you have to know whether the ratio is by volume or by weight. Volumes and weights are not the same thing and can yield vastly different results! A 1:2:3 ratio of sugar:butter:flour by weight is not the same as a 1:2:3 ratio by volume!

A Few Basic Baking Ratios To Remember

The Pound Cake Ratio

The pound cake is based on a ratio by weight. Each ingredient in a pound cake must weigh a pound. To make a classic poundcake, you will need a pound of butter + a pound of sugar + a pound of eggs + a pound of flour (a 1:1:1:1 ratio by weight). Traditionally, you would use the creaming method to incorporate a lot of air into the butter and sugar before adding the other ingredients. The pound cake used to be made without any leaveners, but these days, we'd rather give our pound cakes a little help with some leavening agents, like baking powder and/or baking soda. Given that the pound cake ratio is actually 1:1:1:1, by weight, you can easily scale up or down the recipe to fit your bakeware! That's the beauty of ratios!

The French "quatre quarts" is also a pound cake

The 1-2-3-4 Ratio For Cakes

Of course, if you are baking the 1-2-3-4 cake recipe with all-purpose flour, which most of us are, you will need to add leavening agents, like baking powder and/or baking soda, to help your cakes rise. To replace the milk, you can use 250 mL (1 cup) of another liquid, such as buttermilk. You can even replace the 250 mL (1 cup) of milk with 375 mL (1.5 cups) of sour cream but then the ratio is no longer 1:1:2:3:4, obviously.

Other ways of tweaking the 1-2-3-4 cake:

• add chunks of chocolate, chocolate chips, chopped nuts, or candied fruit to the batter, like I did for this chocolate chip bundt cake
• add fruit, like diced apple, like for this apple bundt cake with salted caramel glaze, but you can also try adding cranberries, chopped pear, or even peaches!
• add spices
• vary the type of sugar and replace some of the granulated sugar with some brown sugar, for example, keeping to the total volume of the recipe so you don't mess with the ratio.

1-2-3 Shortbread Cookie Ratio

Biscuit 1-2-3 Ratio

Sometimes referred to as the 1:2:3 rule for doughs, the amounts of fat,liquid, and flour follow a 1:2:3 ratio by weight.

2:1 Ratio For Perfect Meringues

Other Useful Baking Ratios

Rule Of Thumb	Imperial	Metric
Baking powder	1 teaspoon per 1 cup of flour	5 mL per 125 grams flour
Baking soda	¼ teaspoon per 1 cup of flour	1.25 mL per 125 grams of flour

For leavening agents in cake recipes, the rule of thumb is to use 1 teaspoon (5 mL) of baking for every 125 grams (1 cup) of flour

Resources To Help You Bake With Ratios

If you want to use ratios more when you bake so that you can start getting creative, I highly recommend a few resources to help you:

1. Books:
   • Michael Ruhlman wrote a whole book dedicated to ratios, titled Ratio. In this book, he's documented most of the ratios you might need to bake. You can buy it on Amazon.
2. Conversion charts:
   • Consult the guide to baking conversions and sign up to get the PDF version of the baking conversions chart
   • The Baker's Appendix, also available on Amazon, which is another great resource for understanding how to convert ingredients from one unit of measure to another, like from cups to grams
   • Read all about baking conversions and get the baking conversions charts if you haven't already.
3. Tools: Get a kitchen scale so you can work with ratios by weight, and not just ratios by volume. I love my OXO kitchen scale, and the newest version is available on Amazon.

Realistically, you will find along that way that you can't simplify every single baking recipe to a neat and tidy ratio, like 1-2-3-4. Trust me, I try to all the time, and I get frustrated. Still, the exercise of analyzing a recipe, breaking it down into the ingredients, the ratios, and the techniques, will make you a better baker and is key to mastering baking! And when you realize that most baking recipes follow some sort of formula or ratio, it's very exciting and opens the door to so many creative possibilities.

Need more help with baking conversions?

Most of us aren't born with a natural ability to convert ingredients from cups to grams or ounces. If you would like to learn more about converting recipes from volume to weight measurements, you need the Baking Ingredient conversions chart.