If there's one ingredient that makes the world of difference in baking, it's definitely butter. You can say what you want about baking with butter alternatives, but in our minds, nothing comes close to the real thing. We're not proposing you go Paula Deen on all of your cookies and cakes, but we're unabashed proponents of good butter for any dessert you're putting in the oven.
Butter's high fat content (about 80 percent) makes it good for producing things like flaky pie crusts and perfect chocolate chip cookies. If you use something like margarine instead, which has a lower fat content and higher water content, your cookies won't hold up as well on the baking sheet, spreading out and running the risk of burning if they get too thin. What's more tragic than burnt cookies, when you could have perfectly delicious ones had you only used butter?
Now that we've hopefully convinced you that butter is better, want to know how much butter is in all your favorite baked goods?
You might be surprised that per serving, many classic baked goods contain less butter than you might assume. One to two tablespoons doesn't sound like too much, right? It doesn't sound like a lot until you consider how calorie-dense butter is, and how much fat it contains. Remember when we told you butter is about 80 percent fat? Yeah. One tablespoon of unsalted butter contains approximately 11 grams of fat, and around 100 calories.
Depending on how masochistic you are, this information may or may not leave you interested in finding out how much butter is in your favorite baked goods. But for the curious among you, we've rounded up 9 classic recipes for some of our favorite baked goods and found out just how much butter was called for. Obviously recipes will differ, and there's not one standard, but we searched for common household recipes that we've all seen before, like Nestle Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookies. Here are the results, from least buttery to most:
That's 1/4 of a tablespoon per treat.
That's about 1/2 a tablespoon in two cookies. Doesn't sound that much when you put it that way, right? We're going to go have another cookie.
That's .8 tablespoons per slice. Maybe not as much as you'd expect from a cake with "butter" in the name.
Depending on the roll, you might get around 1/2 to 1 tablespoon per roll.
That's 1 1/2 tablespoons of butter per serving of pound cake.
Per slice, that's 1.75 tablespoons of butter.
That's 2 tablespoons per cupcake.
That's 2 tablespoons per brownie.
At 12 slices per cake, that's 2.67 tablespoons per serving.
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