First of all, taste is a big deal to us here at Penelope's Perfections. If a cake is made with butter, it's going to have a richer flavor than that of oils, shortenings, or margarine. Butter has a way of making everything taste better. It is also why we only use buttercream frosting to ice our cakes.
Another reason we love to use butter in our cakes is because of how easy it is to work with when we are making wedding cakes. Wedding cakes are layered, filled, and stacked which can create a significant amount of weight that a bottom tier of cake has to support. Butter cakes have a compact texture and a small crumb which lends to being more stable for stacking other layers of cake on top. A cake made with butter is firm when it is cold, just like butter. Layering the cake is easy with butter because it doesn't fall apart when it is handled.
So what's the difference between butter, oil, shortening, and margarine in making cakes? Growing up, we've all had store bought cake mixes that call for adding eggs and oil to make a cake. Oil causes the cake to be tall, moist and light with a slightly coarse and open crumb. Oil is lighter than butter and therefore the cake will have more height than a butter based cake. Oil never solidifies when it is cold, so it will always leave an "oily" residue on the crumb that will be perceived as being "moist". The taste of oil vs butter is going to fall short every time with butter being superior. A butter cake will be shorter than an oil cake with a more compact crumb. When margarine is used in making a cake, the results show that the cake is moist but not light, the crumb is coarse, and the cake is salty. Shortening also makes a cake tall and light but the crumb is coarse, dry and crumbly.
Butter cakes not only provide great taste and stability, but they are moist as well. The trick with butter cakes are that they have to be at room temperature before they can be served. Unlike oil, butter has to be warmed to the right temperature. If it is not at room temperature, the butter cake will give an appearance of being hard to cut, dense in texture, or even dry. So be sure to let it sit out for 1-2 hours so it will be at just the right temperature to serve.
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