Cooking For Engineers has a very good
post discussing kitchen scales. I find there are a couple of benefits to using a scale to measure ingredients. Measuring flour by weight is much easier than by using a measuring cup, you don't have to worry about consistent packing. Same is true with something like brown sugar. Ingredients like shortening are also easier to weigh than use water displacement or even trying to use a dry measure cup. Ease of measuring leads to repeatability, which is nice when I make the same recipe for sugar cookies or frosting I can become more consistent. The more variables you can control, the better you can do when it comes to baking.
I wish I would have found this
post before I purchased my scale. Don't get me wrong, I like my scale and it works fine. But this
post is very informative and explains everything you should take into account when you are looking for a scale.
The scale I own is the
Salter
6055. It has all of the options that
Cooking For Engineers recommends and is in the similar price range.
Cooking For Engineer's has a English Toffee recipe I wanted to try. I plan on doing more with toffee plus other candies and brittles around Christmas so I wanted to experiment a little bit. This is the second time I've made a candy this week so I figure it was good practice and more reinforcement on how the whole candy making process works. I varied a little bit from the recipe. OK, I forgot to add the salt but I still thought it turned out pretty good. The chocolate layer is a tad thin as well but I was eyeballing it, I probably should have measured out the chips. Also their method uses a silicon mat or says to use wax paper, I used aluminum foil which worked just fine. The picture on the right is my batch, the one on the left is from the Cooking For Engineer's site.