Substituting Butter for Oil in Cakes
- Thread starter Tintagel
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Butter isn’t 100% fat so you would be reducing the fat and increasing water content by substituting. My experience is that oil gives a moister crumb and allows a cake to stay fresh for longer. If I really wanted to give this a go I’d look up the butter-fat content of your butter and increase the amount to replicate the amount of ‘pure’ fat in the oil, while at the same time reducing the percentage ’water’ content by a similar amount (so, e.g. squeezing out any carrot in a carrot cake to remove the juice, or not soaking fruit in tea). Good luck!
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Oil is all fat, no water
if you use your average grocery store butter, at least in the US, it’s about 80% butterfat, 19% water.
A European style butter like Plugra will have 83% butterfat and about 15% water.
If the butter you’re using is 83% butterfat, then you need 17% more butter.
Unless you’re using cake flour, I don’t think it’s really necessary to reduce your liquid in the recipe. All purpose flour is extremely absorbent and the amount of water in the butter. But cake flour is very low in protein, so it absorbs less liquid than all purpose flour, so the extra water in the butter might adversely affect the texture of the cake.
just be very careful not to over mix the batter, especially if you’re using all purpose flour. Remember that there’s a little extra water in there. Not a lot but a little extra water. Water activates gluten. Too much gluten activation will result in a tough cake.
Now keep in mind that even though you can substitute butter for oil, doing so will change the texture of the cake. Oil cakes are moister and bake higher than butter cakes. There’s a misperception that an oil cake is somehow inferior to a butter cake but that is not the case. An oil cake bakes up and holds up far superior to a butter cake. The difference is oil doesn’t add taste. But there are a number of things that you can add to your batter to give it taste.
rather than substitute the oil, you might do better by using a recipe that is formulated with butter.