Can I Substitute Melted Butter For Oil
Baking By erinmedina Updated 11 Jun 2010 , 2:19pm by EverAfterCakes

can i use melted butter instead of oil in my cake batter?

I have used softened butter (not melted) in place of oil....no problem!



No. Melted butter is not the same as oil -- one is liquid at room temp and one not, and they do different things in a batter.
Ditto.
But I have substituted oil for butter in my muffins, but not butter for oil. I don't think it is the same thing though, it depends on how you mix the cake. The muffins came out fine, same consistency, same crumb, etc. There was no butter taste, but they were just as moist and stayed moister over a period of a few days.
If you substitute there is the liquid content of the butter that you need to compensate for. There is a formula for figuring out how much more liquid you need to add. I have it written down around here somewhere. So if you are substituting butter for oil, you will need to take out some of the liquid in the cake. There is an excellent book/textbook out there called "Professional Baking" by Wayne Gisslen that has the formula in it. In his book he does not say that you can't interchange one for the other, just that you have to rebalance the liquid and fat in the recipe.
I'll look today for the formula and post it here later.

Butter and margarine have about 70%-80% fat content.... so, to get the same moistening effect, you would need to do the simple calculation to make up for the amount of fat content, while subtracting from the water in the formulation... you could however use shortening at a one to one ratio since both have 100% fat content. However shortening could give you more leavening, which could be a good or bad thing.
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