What is the measure for scaling cinnamon if you double a recipe?

What is the measure for scaling cinnamon if you double a recipe? - A Recipe Written on a Notebook

I love bread and butter pudding. We came across a recipe, and had plenty of ingredients, so decided to double everything, including double the cinammon.

This almost worked out perfectly, except that it suddenly felt like we had way too much cinnamon. It was almost as if we should have left the original quantity of cinnamon whilst we doubled everything else.

It seems to me there must be some scaling factor for cinnamon when doubling up a recipe. Something like 2x the recipe but just 1.1x the cinnamon.

My question is: What is the measure for scaling cinnamon if you double a recipe?



Best Answer

If you never prepared the recipe as written (which appears to be the case), you have no basis to tie the way it tastes when doubled to doubling it, rather than to the proportions of the original recipe.

Based on many years of making many things in many sized batches, if I double a recipe and want it to taste the same as the original recipe, I double the cinnamon.

I conclude that the most likely case here is that the original recipe had a lot of cinnamon, and that what you tasted is simply the way it tastes.

Depending what travels the recipe might have had before you met it, there's also a not-uncommon error that occurs with US measurements sometimes - the confusing (by some transcriber in the past) of T and t in hyper-abbreviated notation, which can make a factor of 3 difference (T = Tbs =Tablespoon = 15 ml, t = tsp = teaspoon = 5 ml.) The copy of the recipe you are looking at need not be hyper-abbreviated for this to have happened to it at some point in its past




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How do you double a spice recipe?

Tip: when doubling spices in a recipe, start by multiplying by 1.5 at first. Things like salt, cayenne, pepper, etc, can get too strong if they're outright doubled. (For example, if a recipe calls for 1 teaspoon salt, add 1 \xbd teaspoons instead of 2 when doubling.)

How do you double measurements?

Simply take the original recipe and multiply all of the ingredients by two. This will give you the measurements for the doubled recipe. For example, if a recipe calls for 1/2 cup of sugar then you would use 1 cup of sugar when doubling the recipe.

How much cinnamon do I add?

Some experts suggest 1/2 to 1 teaspoon (2-4 grams) of powder a day. Some studies have used between 1 gram and 6 grams of cinnamon. High doses might be toxic.

Why does doubling a recipe not work?

Truth is, there's chemistry involved too, and formulas for baked goods are based on specific measurements; so doubling ingredients can disturb this precision and yield a supersized amount of something you can't enjoy (via MyRecipes).



When Scales Lie (Weighing Salt, Yeast, and Other Small Ingredients)




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Images: Lucas Guizo, Pixabay, SHVETS production, Ketut Subiyanto