I need a little advice. I can not seem to make a cake where butter is the fat and not have it come out dry. I tend to look for scratch cake recipes that call for oil because I can make those come out great. I can even do fine on the recipes where you fold the whipped egg whites in at the end. But, I would love to be able to make a good vanilla/butter cake. I make cookies and custards and pizza crusts and all from scratch, but I am totally defeated by butter based cakes. And I don't like being defeated.

So, give me all your tips PLEASE! I make sure all the ingredients are room temp, then I beat the heck out of the butter and sugar in my kitchen aid. Then I add all the other ingredients in the order specified on the recipes, mixing just until combined. Eggs are one at a time. I alternate flour with milk at the end. I've tried mutliple recipes so I don't think it is the recipe. I think it is me. Any thoughts.

I've never had any success at a butter based scratch yellow cake either. Honestly, even the butter recipe yellow box mix cakes are crappy compared to the oil based ones. I have no idea why. It's amazing how easy it is to make a divine chocolate cake, but yellow cakes just do not work for me unless I'm soaking them in some sort of glaze. There is a huge thread on here... let me see if I can find it...Here we go:

http://cakecentral.com/cake-decorating-ftopict-633981-scratch.html+yellow

Read that and you'll probably learn all you need to know to make the best from-scratch-yellow-cake

I've made Dawn's Vanilla Butter cake (not really sure the exact name, but sound something like that) from here, and it's so moist and lip smacking good.

It uses whole eggs, no need to separate & fold at the last step.
Give it a try!

I'm with you, hollylikescake. I can bake anything else, just not butter-based yellow cakes. Or white cakes, for that matter. (And please, for Heaven's sake - unless you want something you can lace up, add shoe polish to, and wear to the office, DON'T EVER ask me to make a pot roast!)

But sure... Tiramisu with scratch ladyfingers? Got it. NY cheesecake without cracks? Heck yeah. Scratch pie crust that shatters at the touch of a fork? Can do that. I even just made a scary successful couple of challah loaves on my first attempt recently, so look out, yeast breads! But scratch white or yellow cake? Uhhhh... Well, I can MAKE them, I'm just not sure you'd want to EAT them. And they don't even have the benefit of possible alternate uses like bad pot roast. Except maybe as frisbees.

I recently made a Ron Ben-Israel vanilla butter cake that tasted like a shortbread cookie. Delicious! And sliced, it was the most beautiful cake I ever baked. Unfortunately, it was about as moist as a shortbread cookie!

I wish I could help, but I will be watching this thread with you, hoping someone can shed some light on this specific thing. And SugarMoon, that's a great thread. One day I will get through it all!

Best the heck out of butter and sugar

Can you elaborate on this? What speed how long, what is e temp of the butter? What other I gradients are in the cake? are the sides pulling away from the pan before you take it out of the oven?

I make nothing but butter cakes and have rarely experienced dry, except for when I first started. When I make an oil based cake I miss the butter taste, so I have a tendency to stick with butter.

And what recipes have you tried?