...oil for part of the butter in a cake recipe? I'd love to have the flavor of butter with the moistness of oil.

I'd love to know too! Oil cakes are so much moister!

Is oil really moister? My yellow butter cake always comes out MUCH moister than white or chocolate (which use oil). Of course, I'm using a modified box cake mix, so maybe it's different from scratch?

I did recently try the WASC, which turned out much better (moisture wise and taste wise) than a regular white mix, but still not as moist as the yellow butter one. Hmm.

Is the difference just in the mix, I wonder?

Yeah... I think we are referring to scratch cakes. I have to problems with the doctored mixes, but when it comes to scratch, the oil cakes are always moister than the butter ones. At least that's the case for me. The butter cakes are not dry, just that the oil ones are moister.

Thanks Sharon, that's good to know! I'd like to start branching out into scratch mixes... so I'll have to store this info in my library.

Can you add sour cream or something to the butter? I have a chocolate cake that uses all butter (no oil) but also includes sour cream in it...and its very dense and moist.

My son can't eat dairy and I've tried the oil for butter swap in a lot of recipies and I've found that there isn't a hard and fast swaping ratio, it depends on the other ingredients in your cake.

Butter is naturally about 80% fat and 20% water so the easiest thing to do is swap the butter weight for 80% oil but then you need to look at the recipe and see how much moisture is in the other ingredients as there will be less water in the overall recipe - for recipes with other liquids the missing water might make no difference but if there are no other wet ingredients you could try adding a bit of water, milk, soya milk etc.

It might take a bit of trial and error.

HTH

Sara