When Sweet, the baking book I co-authored with Yotam Ottolenghi, came out in the United States in 2017, my excitement at seeing so many people bake from it was matched only by my horror at what I saw them pulling from their ovens on Instagram: pale cakes with thick, dark exteriors.
Posts from Australian and British readers showed no alarming results and I quickly realised something had gone awry in the American translation. As it turned out, the recipes had been converted in-house by the publisher, using a straightforward formula to change celsius to fahrenheit. What no one had noticed was that the conversion also needed to take into account the oven setting: fan-forced versus conventional heat. Many American ovens, it seems, still don’t have a fan function. Reader, there were tears.
