What Happens If You Double The Butter In Your Sheet Cake?

Whether you're baking for a barbecue or a birthday, sheet cake is the ultimate crowd-pleaser. The cake typically consists of flour, sugar, water, baking soda, salt, eggs, and vanilla — all baked together in, of course, a sheet pan. Also in that arsenal of classic sheet cake ingredients?  Butter, which, when doubled, can make your cake taste all the better. While doubling ingredients in many baking recipes — we're looking at you, salt — can prove disastrous, a new ratio of butter is one of the few exceptions that doesn't taste like an error.

As evidenced by The Pioneer Woman, Ree Drummond, extra butter is more of a good thing and can improve upon an already delicious recipe. After mistaking one cube of butter for a full cup in her mother-in-law's sheet cake recipe, Drummond hasn't looked back. In fact, once she realized that it was the extra butter that differentiated her sheet cake from other versions, she owned her error — and embraced it. "I kept it with my tweak!" she told Taste of Home, noting that her husband, in particular, prefers it to his mother's.
As for why double the butter is double the fun? Think of the taste and texture butter brings to the pan. 

While there are all kinds of butter varieties, each has something in common. Namely, butter offers both richness and tenderness to baked goods. As a commonly used fat,  butter is largely responsible for the amount of moisture in your cake, cookies, cupcakes, and so on. So, the more butter you add, the closer you'll get to that ultra-soft texture of your sheet cake dreams. Less butter results in a drier, chewier cake. 

Although you can stick with just a stick of butter, it certainly can't hurt to follow Drummond's example. On The Pioneer Woman website, she outlines her sheet cake recipe, which, indeed, calls for two sticks of butter. For the sake of a sheet cake, this butter is best used in melted form and mixed with the other ingredients.

Once you add, or double, your butter, all that's left to do is carefully remove your sheet cake from its pan. Then, you'll want to frost your finished cake. Herein lies yet another opportunity to bring butter to your sheet cake — all in the form of a smooth and silky frosting that seals the deal.