How much flour is fifty pounds of flour?

My friends (and lots of other people, too) know that I bake a lot. In my opinion, one of the biggest challenges of baking is acquiring the all of the necessary ingredients, and the heaviest burden is the sugar and flour (pun only partially intended). Especially when you live the city life without a car.

King Arthur Flour decided they wanted to make this part of the baking experience a handful more pleasant. Not only are their flours among the best available based both on quality and consistent quality, but one can order large quantities of their flours online without unreasonable shipping charges, which removes lugging ten pounds of flour from the grocery store on top of milk, eggs, meat, and produce from my weekly routine. It's an excellent marketing trick for them, too: in addition to brand loyalty, I never think twice about buying cake flour in addition to all-purpose flour because clicking that extra "add to cart" is much more convenient than spending some quality time with a sifter and ending up with only a reasonable approximation of what I actually wanted.

Unfortunately, even standard ground shipping isn't free. While there isn't a flat rate per order - entirely unsurprising as flours do weigh nontrivial amounts - you tend to get a better deal if you buy more flour per order. Let me say what I mean to say: I try to consolidate my flour orders into larger orders - orders that I expect to last about four months. As such, my last two flour orders have been upwards of fifty pounds. My last order (which should be arriving soon!) had fifty pounds of unbleached all-purpose flour alone.

"Holy flour, Batman! Fifty pounds of flour over the course of four months?" Well, I bake a lot. But it's been very hard for me to quantify what "I bake a lot" actually means in terms of pounds of flour because we generally think of baking in terms of tablespoons and cups. The internet combined with some basic math leads me to believe that fifty pounds of flour works out to about 200 cups, but 200 is still a sufficiently large number of cups that it is hard to fathom in terms of delicious, ready to eat baked goods.

To help quantify what fifty pounds of flour really is, I've created a Twitter account, @cupsofflour, to track both how much flour I buy and how much flour I use in each baked good I create. I know that it won't answer the question "how much flour is fifty pounds of flour?" as accurately as I might wish because I won't just be tracking my consumption of all-purpose flour (though I will be certain to distinguish what types of flour I'm use each time I bake) and because I rarely actually let my cabinet run out of flour completely (though I was completely out of all-purpose flour for about four days last week). I'll try to post a picture accompanying the type and measurement of flour in attempts to paint the most complete picture. Also, so that I can overwhelm you with my baking habits.