American recipes

American recipes measure dry foods by volume; I'm afraid this does my head in: how compacted does the substance have to be in the measuring container? The more compacted, the heavier it will be. You don't get this problem with grams! :)

I was using a recipe that required 1/4 cup of almond flour, firmly packed. This, I could just about cope with, although it's a bother to firmly pack stuff into a container. I have started weighing out how much these cupfuls weigh. The aforementioned almonds weigh 50 grams.

The chemist in me would like everything to be measured in moles, but counting them out would take forever (1 mole = 6.02214×10^23 constituent particles of substance), and I never did get the hang of converting moles to grams. For reference, 1 mole of carbon-12 has a mass of 12 grams.