My family tends to consume a good amount of sweets so I try to be health conscious as much as I can when I use some products in the desserts I make. Most of the cakes and muffins I make I substitute the butter in them with oil, sunflower or canola oil. If the recipe calls for less than 90g of butter I usually don’t bother and use them. It must be noted that not all recipes can handle this substitution, such as cakes that specially has butter as a main ingredient usually named butter cakes, cookies, and cakes made by the melting method where you need to melt the butter with other ingredients on a flame. In the case you are not sure if you can make the substitution use the exact ingredients in the recipe.
Butter and oil have different constituents so you need to make up for that difference meaning you can’t substitute the same amount of butter with oil. If you have a problem with dealing with fractions and decimals you might find this tiring but you have to suffer for your creations so to speak 😛 Butter is usually put in grams which you have to convert to cups or tablespoons in order to find the equivalent cup and tablespoon of oil.
In this link you will find a butter converter only and scroll down to find already converted numbers between grams and cups.
Another online converter, this is more number accurate and it doesn’t round like the one above.
This is the butter to oil converter
Here are some fractions and decimals:
0.25 = 1/4
0.33 = 1/3
0.50 = 1/2
0.66 = 2/3
0.75 =3/4
For the recipes I post here I made the conversions, if you need any number just make a comment and I’ll help out.
I didn’t have any mishaps with these substitutions but I did round the numbers so if you try it yourself and find a ¼ tsp difference it is because of that.
- 90g butter = ¼ cup + 2 ¼ teaspoons of oil
- 125g butter = ¼ cup + 2 tablespoons + 2 teaspoons of oil
- 180g butter= 9 tablespoons + 1 ½ teaspoons of oil
Other substitutions in case you don’t have the exact ingredient:
- Self-raising flour, substitute for every cup of self-raising flour with a cup of plain flour plus 2 teaspoons of baking powder. If you have less than a cup of self-raising flour then use double amount of baking powder in teaspoons, for example ½ cup plain flour + 1 teaspoon of baking powder, ¾ cup + 1 ½ teaspoon of baking powder and do the same thing if you have more than a cup.
- 1 cup butter milk, substitute with skim milk or put in a measuring cup 1 tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar and add milk to reach 1 cup then leave a few minutes without stirring, or use 1 cup plain yogurt.
- Golden syrup/maple or pancake syrup can be substituted with honey.
If I find any other important substitution I will add it to this post which will be found at the top of the recipe page and I will indicate if I made a change.
Silver desserts 