Our contributor, Summer Stone, is here to share some insight on how fat affects our cake recipes…
I fully admit I am a bit of a butter fanatic. I love nothing more than a kitchen filled with the heady aroma of baked goods loaded with the golden richness of sweet cream butter. But the scientist in me demands that I keep an open mind when evaluating which kind of fat leads to the best cake. Fat in cake plays a diverse set roles; it provides moistness, aeration (leavening), flavor, texture and tenderness. The problem with determining which type of fat qualifies as the cake-fat champion is that different fats affect different characteristics of the cake. Butter is known for its flavor profile, oil for moisture provision, shortening for aeration and margarine a combination of attributes.
In order to get a handle on how varied fats alter cake properties, I baked a vanilla cake recipe varying only the type of fat used. The fats included butter, canola oil, shortening and stick-type margarine. Here is what I discovered about using different fats in this cake.
BUTTER:
Being slightly butter prejudiced, I expected the butter cake to be the flavor standout. What I found was that the flavor of the butter was difficult to detect even when compared directly to the other cakes. I think if these cakes were laden with buttercream the subtle differences would be even less distinguishable. The value of the butter came in its ability to create a beautifully fine-textured cake. The small crumb size was noticeable when compared to the more open crumb of all of the other cakes. This compact crumb does lead to a cake that has less height than the others, but even so, it did not seem overly dense.
OIL:
I was pleasantly surprised by the oil cake. I expected it to be moist, which it was; the oil cake was definitely the moistest of all of the cakes. But what I found interesting was that the oil cake was as tall and light as the shortening cake. I had expected the oil cake to be more short and dense since oil doesn’t hold air pockets as well as butter or shortening, but this was not the case. This cake did have a slightly coarser, more open crumb than the butter cake but the texture was by no means unpleasant. I also expected the oil cake to taste flat, yet it had a pleasant neutral vanilla flavor that tasted quite similar to the butter cake.
SHORTENING:
The shortening cake was by far my least favorite. While the cake was tall and light in density, the texture was coarse, dry and crumbly. The flavor was fine, but the texture was so unappealing that any favorable characteristics were overshadowed.
MARGARINE:
Truthfully, I expected the margarine cake to be awful. But it wasn’t as bad as I had envisioned. The margarine cake was nearly as moist as the oil cake though it did not have the same light texture. It was also coarser than the oil and butter cakes and possessed more air pockets. The salt present in the margarine made the cake a bit too salty, but overall the cake was decent on most fronts. I would not say this cake was bad, but neither would I say it was great.
I am not willing to give up lovely, creamy butter in my cakes but the results of these tests inspire me to replace some of the butter with oil in the future. I don’t have to fear that the oil will adversely affect the taste of the cake and the benefit of moistness is highly desirable.
Take a look at your cake recipe today and perhaps give another fat a chance.
Interesting article. Many years ago, I took my aunt’s chocolate cake recipe, and, not know that there were different kinds of shortening, used vegetable oil in place of the “shortening.” The cake was a disaster. I have used Crisco and / or butter in my cakes since then.
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I’d be interested to see you repeat this test with lard (which is animal fat and has a different ratio of types of fats than what people usually call “shortening” — typically coconut or palm fat).
I’d also like to see a more naturally-extracted coconut or palm oil compared with the shortening, to see how much the processing comes to bear on the final product.
Does anyone can publish a cake recipe with half butter and half oil and how to mix these? Thank you.
Here is what I found when looking for a half oil, half butter recipe for cupcakes. I think I might try these tomorrow.
https://bakingisascienceblog.blogspot.com/2013/08/vanilla-cupcakes-great-butter-vs-oil.html?m=1
Thanks julie,I will try
Have you tried lard or beef tallow (animal shortening type ) to see how it works in cakes?
Is the oil & butter substitution ratio 1:1?
Great tips!! This gives a particular source of differentiation between the quantum of shortening, butter, margarine and oil. I usually prefer cakes loaded and enriched with butter as they are just yum!!!!
I like to homogenize the oil in a food processor. I place my sugar and eggs in a food processor. Pulse a few times that turn it on. Then slowly add the oil through the feed shoot
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Great article! This is actually something I learned over years of baking. I find that most people don’t really like buttercream frosting here in Europe and everyone seems to love whipped cream or mascarpone based frostings with fruit fillings etc… and cakes like this really HAVE to be refrigerated. When I use all butter cake, the cake part becomes really hard as it’s cool, which is normal = butter when cold is hard. That’s why I use a good amount of light olive or sunflower oil in my cakes along with butter and it really makes a huuuge difference! You should really try my recipe for basic vanilla cake or cupcakes (I use it for both and works great!).
170 g cake flour
1 + 1/4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
80 g butter, soft
40 g light olive, sunflower or canola oil
150 g sugar
2 eggs (about 55 g each)
1 tsp vanilla (extract or paste, whatever you prefer)
120 g whole milk
Just sift together all the dry ingredients (flour, baking powder and salt), whisk em togehtehr and set aside. In a large bowl or in the bowl of a stand mixer cream together butter, oil and sugar for about 3 minutes, until pale and fluffy. Add your eggs (one at a time) and vanilla and mix everything. Also at this point don’t forget to scrape down the sides and bottom of the bowl, so everything mixes evenly. Finally, add your dry in 3 parts alternating with the milk in 2 parts. Mix on low speed until just combined, do not overmix! This makes about 12 cupcakes or one 9-inch round cake which can be splited in half. I usually double the ingredients, divide the batter between 2 x 9 inch pans so later I have 4 thin layers when the cakes are splited. This really is my go-to vanilla cake/cupcake recipe, it’s moist, buttery and still quite soft even after refrigerating!
So if anyone asks me whats my secret to a perfect cake, I say the combinatiion of butter and oil!
I have been baking anything that I can find online from the Great British Bake-Off. Most of my cakes and bread come out somewhat dry and do not last well past a day or two (they become even dryer.) All the recipes that I have used so far, call for butter. I was wondering if I could split the difference and use a combination of butter and oil? If you could let me know, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks so much.
To BBBAKER, thanks for sharing you butter/oil vanilla cake which I will make soon. I will let you know how it turns out. Also, for those that want to know how to replace some butter with oil in cake recipes, I use this formula. First, I would start with 1/4th of the butter. So if recipe asks for 2 sticks of butter (about 226 grams), I would take out 1/4 stick butter (4 tbsp or 2 oz or about 56.5 grams) butter and replace it with 80% oil (vegetable or corn or canola…) and 20% milk. So 56.5 grams butter = 45.2 grams oil plus 11.3 grams milk. This formula is based on the fact that butter is 80% fat and 20% milk while oil is 100% fat. Obviously, for this to be most accurate, you need a scale. I have a digital scale. But I know that many of us who live in the US do not have scales. Also, I do agree that cakes with oil are so much more moist and lighter than cakes with butter; but the downside is that butter gives more flavor to the cake, so I recommend that when you use an oil based cake to maybe increase the amount of vanilla extract and/or add some orange/lemon/lime zest. But this all depends on the type of cake you are making.
Very interesting! I cannot bring myself to use margarine or shortening but recently did make
a yellow /vanilla cake that used oil instead of butter and it was quite nice.
Here’s the ratio of swapping oil for butter or vice-versa
50 grams of BUTTER with 40 grams of OIL
80 grams of BUTTER with 64 grams of OIL
100 grams of BUTTER with 80 grams of OIL
120 grams of BUTTER with 96 grams of OIL
150 grams of BUTTER with 120 grams of OIL
180 grams of BUTTER with 144 grams of OIL
200 grams of BUTTER with 160 grams of OIL
220 grams of BUTTER with 176 grams of OIL
250 grams of BUTTER with 200 grams of OIL