And also out of curiosity why would you measure flour in decilitres? It's not a liquid so wouldn't it be best measured in grams?
Because apart from maybe meat, vegetables and such and butter, everything is listed by volume even though it would make more sense to do it by weight as it's more accurate. I guess Finns just don't have kitchen scales
Decilitres are very handy, when you're talking about amounts that aren't very large or very small. A recipe might call for 2 dl of sugar, it looks a lot better (to me) than 200 ml or 0,2 l. Pretty much everything that's over 10 ml and less than 1 l is done in deciliters, usually you just say desi and everyone knows you're talking about volume, even though, at least in theory, deci- can mean a ten of every measurement (I've never heard of decigrams used though).
I do much of my baking with American recipes (but with Finnish ingredients so the results aren't probably quite right but as I've never tasted the real things I don't mind it) and have a measuring cup for that. The recipes look rather different from Finnish ones, I think.
In case someone is interested, here's a recipe for "American cookies" (without the instructions which are pretty basic) given to me by a friend, I suspect that it was translated into Finnish at some point, so now I'll translate it back:
250g margariinia (pehmeää) margarine (soft) *
2dl sokeria sugar
2dl fariinisokeria brown sugar **
1tl vaniliinisokeria vanillin sugar ***
2 kananmunaa eggs
5,75dl vehnäjauhoja wheat flour ****
1tl soodaa baking soda
1tl suolaa salt
5dl suklaata pilkottuna chopped chocolate *****
*Margarine and butter are sold either in plastic tubs with no measurements in them or for baking as blocks wrapped in paper with measurements, but not in sticks.
** This is the type of brown sugar that's white sugar mixed with molasses
*** Vanilla is almost always mixed with sugar here, not an extract. Vanillin is artificial vanilla that is quite vile, I like to use real vanilla but it's quite expensive to find some that's not mixed with vanillin. tl = tea spoon
**** This measurement makes me think that this recipe was originally translated, as that's a bit strange. Measuring flour by volume is so inexact anyway that for most people it wouldn't probably matter if they used 6 dl instead of 5,75.
***** Readymade chocolate chips don't exist here or at least I've never encountered them so you have to chop the chocolate yourself. My friend used Swedish milk chocolate that has pieces of a
Daim bar in it, it was surprisingly good.