My Simple Swap for Vegetable Oil That Makes Boxed Cake Mix Taste 1000x Better
You probably don’t need me to convince you that baking mixes are magic in a box. With just a few supplemental ingredients and, oftentimes, a single bowl, you’re well on your way to a delicious dessert. In some cases, it just might taste even better than the from-scratch stuff (eh hem, brownies).
While these boxed mixes are damn near perfect in their own right, my many many years of experience have taught me there’s always a little room for improvement. (I feel that way about most things in my life, and particularly when it comes to food, which is why I always ask for constructive feedback.)
There is no shortage of tips on how to upgrade baking mixes — especially cakes. Some people add an extra egg or two or instant pudding mix (which you can find for well under $1 at Aldi), while others will replace the recipe’s requested water with milk or even sour cream, mayo, or really good Greek yogurt. My favorite one-ingredient swap is substituting butter for the requested vegetable oil.
Why You Should Add Butter to Boxed Baking Mixes
I’ve been swapping butter for oil for decades. I don’t remember exactly which boxed baking mix started it all, but if I had to guess I’d put my money on brownies. Vegetable oil is a neutral oil, which means it adds little to no flavor to food. That is great for roasting, say, vegetables if you don’t really care for the flavor of olive oil on your food.
I love a dense, fudgy brownie square and saw an easy opportunity to layer on some richness to that equation.
I always have butter in my home — before the last stick from a four-pack moves from the freezer to the fridge, I replenish my stash. (I credit this behavior to my mother, who still buys the bulk packs at BJ’s Wholesale Club even though she and my father are empty nesters.) Knowing that most from-scratch recipes call for butter, not oil, I decided to see if this simple switcheroo would yield better results. By now, you know it did.
How to Substitute Butter for Oil in Boxed Baking Mixes
It’s a straight 1-to-1 swap. So I simply melted the butter in the microwave, allowing it to cool slightly while I did all the other steps (preheat the oven, grease baking pans, crack eggs, etc.), and then added it to the mix. Once baked and ready to eat, the brownies were decidedly richer and delightfully fudgy with an on-the-edge-of-underbaked texture. In a word: perfection.
From brownies, I began using butter instead of oil in muffin and cake mixes (and also pancake mixes), too, and I’ve never really stopped.
I tested it out again earlier this week with a classic yellow cake mix, and it was as good as I remembered it. Similar to the brownies, the cake has a richer flavor with a texture that’s ever so slightly more dense than if you’d used oil, though not quite as much as pound cake.
Buy: Betty Crocker Favorites Super Moist Yellow Cake Mix, $2.59 for 13.25 ounce at Instacart