Vegetable oil or shortening is your best bet at ensuring your baked goods don't stick to the pan; however, they do little to flavor your recipe. If you use butter, the key is to use it sparingly, preferably along with a nonstick pan.
The verdict: Use butter if you want to. If you have extreme concerns about your cake sticking, use shortening (which is pure fat with no water), cooking spray, or baking spray. Coconut oil or bacon fat will also work, as will clarified butter which has the milk solids removed.
You can use anything from a canola oil or olive oil spray to coconut oil or butter. Olive oil can be used in a pinch, but is a little harder to get to stick to the sides of the pan if you go too heavy handed. My personal choice is an olive oil spray, so it still sticks all around the pan and is easy to use.
I am all for simplifying things in the kitchen, but this is one step you should not skip. If you are baking a cake, always grease and flour the pan before adding the batter if you want the cake to unmold cleanly and easily. This is extra important if you're using a fancy bundt pan or making a tall, multi-layered cake.
Cakes Have Excessive Shrinkage (excessive pulling away from the sides of the pan): The oven temperature may be too high. The baking time may be too long. The pans may be too close to each other or too close to the oven walls.
If you are baking an angel food cake, or a cake that gets its rising power from an egg white foam, you don't grease the pan, for one reason: Egg white foam cake batters rise better when they have a surface that they can grip onto and essentially climb up, like the ungreased walls of a cake pan.
Greasing the bottom of a baking pan makes cakes easier to remove. Many recipes also call for flouring the pan after it is greased, typically when the recipe is particularly high in fat. The whole idea is to form a barrier, to keep the batter from clinging to the pan.
The texture of cakes made with oil is—in general—superior to the texture of cakes made with butter. Oil cakes tend to bake up loftier with a more even crumb and stay moist and tender far longer than cakes made with butter.
But butter is not necessarily the best choice for everything. When it comes to greasing pans, vegetable oil and shortening are actually better choices. They may not impart any extra butter flavor to the “crusts” of your cake, but they are both more effective at preventing cakes from sticking than butter.
When a cake bakes in a non-greased pan, it will adhere to the glass or metal instead of having a thin layer of fat or oil working as a layer of defense. So, in your attempt to remove the cake from the pan the cake will struggle to come out, which will often result in the crumb tearing or falling to pieces.
Can I Use Both Butter and Oil in Cake? Oh yes, you sure can. This recipe has a combination of butter and oil to give off that nice buttery taste while keeping it soft and moist at the same time. Cake using pure butter tends to be more dense and dry compared to adding oil into the batter.
To ensure your cakes slide easily out of the pan, we recommend swapping the cooking spray for butter. First, grease cake pans with unsalted butter.
It's best to heat the pan first, then add oil or butter. You add oil after the pan is hot to prevent the oil from breaking down prematurely. It can make a huge difference because broken down oil becomes sticky. And sticky oil can ruin your culinary creation - not good.
Make sure you have a clean and dry cake pan. With clean hands rub butter inside the pan, making sure to smear it across the entirety of the pan's interior.
Yes, you grease the pan and then also grease the parchment. This creates an ultra-nonstick environment for your cake. The cake won't stick to the pan, and the parchment round won't stick to the cake.
When the cake first comes out of the oven, it's cooked through but the hot "crumb" — the mass of the cake — is delicate. If you try to get it out of the pan too soon it can stick to the pan, break, or both. For most cakes, allow around 20 to 30 minutes at room temperature for cooling (per MasterClass).
Cakes typically bake between 325 to 450 degrees F (see chart with Tip #9). Most convection ovens require lowering the temperature by 25 to 50 degrees F, as well as turning off the fan.
Most cakes bake at 350°F. Reducing the temperature to 325°F is all you need to do to get a flat-topped cake.
Add a leavening agent to the flour. Most cakes will call for a leavening agent like baking powder or baking soda. These create the bubbles you need for the cake to rise.
Let the cake cool.
It should spend at least twenty to thirty minutes on your cooling rack or countertop before you even attempt to remove it from its pan.