One Vintage Find From Thrift Stores Make The Most Charming Kitchen Scoops

As far as social media kitchen trends go (and aren't most trends more or less sourced from social media these days?), styles that you might be able to snap up at the thrift store are among the most forgiving. Even enduring items like copper pots seem sweeter when they're cheaper and secondhand, so more fleeting fancies should also be affordability-forward. And if teacup kitchen scoops have swept your page, then you should plan a visit to the thrift store right away.

Teacup kitchen scoops, which are best displayed in large, lidded, see-through glass jars, are a darling way to divvy up flour, sugar, or whatever else you prefer to remove from its humdrum manufacturers' packaging. You can then use them to scoop out your ingredients from the jars as and when needed. That said, you might not want to brush your good vintage stuff against very abrasive grains to keep it from getting damaged from day after day of scooping. Thrift store finds, whether they're cutesy and uniform, or cleverly mismatched, are the best way to bring the vintage teacup trend into your own home while reserving your actual serving sets for, you know, serving.

You can freestyle a lot of your scooping if you're just eyeballing coffee beans for the grinder or portioning a bowl of cereal. But few people will be able to calculate more precise quantities for those critical baking projects that require exact amounts. You could simply break out your real measuring cups for the occasion, but you could also make the same teacups for functional by marking a few standard measures with foodsafe permanent ink on them. Pour a measured half or full cup of a dry item like salt into the teacup and draw a line to nix some of the guesswork going forward.

Now, turning your teacups into de facto measuring cups will probably be just fine for your more forgiving preparations like the easiest cookie recipes for beginners. But even aspiring pros will tell you that, when perfection is on the line, what might appear to be something like a cup of sugar is just not equal to what might look like that same cup of flour. When one ingredient is heavier than the other, these "cups" actually contain different volumes of products. But you can still use your teacups for scooping if you measure in weighted grams, rather than cups. This is why a weighted digital scale is a must-have for more serious baking endeavors. It lets the digital display do the work while your thrifted finds can simply sit pretty.