Thanks to the Internet, home cooks now have access to a seemingly infinite supply of cooking recipes. Seeking a recipe for Baked Alaska? A quick Google search delivers more than a half-million results.

But what do you do when a recipe uses a measuring system other than yours? For example, what if you’re in the U.K., using imperial measures, but the recipe you want is from France, using metric measures?

Two mobile apps for your Nokia touchscreen device can help. Both provide quick and easy conversions among different measurement systems. Sure, you could rely on formulas — you know, Celsius = (Fahrenheit – 32) x 9/5 — but these apps are a whole lot easier, faster, and more accurate.

The two apps, Kitchen Calculator and Genius Converter, differ in their ambitions. Kitchen Calculator is happy to simply convert common measurements used in the kitchen, such as cups, teaspoons, and dashes. Genius Converter, on the other hand, is far broader in its scope. Kitchen conversions are offered, to be sure. But so are 36 other categories, including acceleration, radio activity, and computer memory, for a total of 450 units.

Let’s look first at Kitchen Calculator by CannyTech. At launch, the app presents the following screen:

The four icons across the top of the screen indicate the four main categories of measurements you can convert: Volume, weight, temperature, and distance. That’s the first selection you need to make.

Next, select the measurement you are converting from, then the measurement you wish to convert to. For example, let’s say a recipe calls for 8 grams of flour, but you want to convert that to ounces. To calculate, first select the Weight category:

Next, select grams as the unit to convert from. Then select ounces as the unit to convert to. Finally, enter 8 as the number of units to be converted. The answer: 8 grams equals 0.282 ounces, as shown below.

Overall, using Kitchen Calculator is fast and easy. But I did find myself wishing that some of the touch icons were larger. Small icons meant I sometimes made annoying mistakes.

Also, on the main category screens, the icons do not appear to be arranged in any sort of order. That’s not a problem on the Temperature category screen, which has only two icons. But the Volume category screen has more than 20 icons. Placing them in alphabetical order would have enhanced usability.

Finally, when I used the app in landscape mode on my Nokia N8 test device, the icons became oddly distorted. As you can see here, it is almost as if the app were being reflected in a funhouse mirror:

The other app, Genius Converter, is a whole other kettle of fish. Publisher TwistSoft describes the app as an ‘advanced unit converter’, and that sounds about right. Genius Converter converts not only measurements you might use on a daily basis – such as fuel consumption and temperatures – but also those you would use only if you are a scientist or engineer, such as permeability, capacitance, and viscosity.

Just for kitchen conversions, Genius Converter offers 25 measurements, including some that are used only rarely, such as gills, jiggers, and metric salt-spoons.

Unlike Kitchen Converter, this app takes a menu-driven approach. At launch, Genius Converter presents you with an alphabetical list of its 37 categories. Below, you can see I have selected Cooking Measures:

Next, the app asks you to select the measurement you wish to convert from. Again, the choices are presented in an alphabetical list:

Next, you enter the Value, which is a somewhat complicated way of saying Number of Units. For example, if you want to convert from 1 U.S. cup, then the Value would be 1.

Finally, you need to select the measurement you wish to convert to. Again, you select from the app’s menu system. Once you do this, the conversion is automatically performed.

For my test, I converted U.S. cups to U.K. gills. The app calculates that 1 cup equals approximately 1.7 gills, as shown here:

Change any of the three variables – conversion from, conversion to, or volume – and Genius Converter automatically recalculates the conversion. That’s genius!

While both Genius Converter and Kitchen Calculator work well, there is one common recipe conversion problem they cannot handle. In the U.S., most recipes are based on volume; that is, you measure out ingredients by the quart, cup, tablespoon, and teaspoon. But in Europe, most recipes measure ingredients by weight; so many grams of this ingredient, so many grams of that. Since different ingredients have different masses, there is no way to make this conversion. For example, a cup of milk weighs a lot more than a cup of chopped parsley. So for this conversion challenge, you will still need your measuring cups, spoons, and kitchen scale.

Kitchen Calculator is available in Ovi Store, and it sells for $0.99 (USD). Genius Converter is also available in Ovi Store, and it sells for $2.99 (USD). Both apps run on Nokia Symbian touchscreen devices.