Michelle Southan’s guide for making the perfect butter cake

Cooking expert Michelle Southan made all the worst cake fails, so you don’t have to. Here’s her perfect butter cake guide - tested 125 times!

Michelle Southan

4 min read

March 20, 2024 - 4:00AM

Recipes

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It was supposed to be the easiest butter cake recipe ever – and 125 trials later, it is.

I wrote this cake recipe in 2001. It was 23 years ago and what feels like another lifetime (yet only yesterday in my mind). In fact, this recipe is the same age as one of our taste.com.au team members (scary!).

My butter cake recipe has stood the test of time in my kitchen, and I still use it for birthday parties today. But it didn’t start out as the perfect butter cake recipe it is today. I test and retest recipes all the time as the Food Director at taste, but this recipe takes the cake (so to speak). Here’s how it came about.

A simple butter cake you say? It wasn't easy finding perfection.

Why I tested my simple butter cake recipe 125 times

As an ambitious assistant food editor at that time, I really wanted to prove myself when I was set the challenge of perfecting the butter cake recipe. I had always loved baking and grew up sitting on the kitchen bench with my mum baking weekly – so, I thought, surely I could do it.

I wanted this recipe to be the best celebration cake ever, the one-stop-shop recipe for an easy cake that would cater for almost everyone. I wanted to design a cake for which you could choose your cake, pick a flavour flavour then count how many people you were serving it to and get a cake size to match that number. To be honest, it’s still a cake query I am always asked.

How your butter cake should look.

What I was looking for in the perfect butter cake recipe

The perfect basic butter cake needed to be easy and simple to make. But, for me, it was also about the texture. I wanted a soft fine crumb that was buttery and melts in the mouth. No one likes dry cake.

As part of this culinary cake challenge, I wanted the cakes to serve at least 20 people and up to 25. This sounds easy, but (as I soon discovered) it wasn’t. The base recipe would need to be a great solid cake that you could then twist to make other flavours and sizes.

Then came the cake fails

I tested the easy butter cake for weeks and weeks. Cake after cake quickly became a disaster.

A simple butter cake you say? I have made hundreds of cakes in my time as a recipe developer, but this cake, in the last 5 minutes of baking, would open in the centre and tear in two right in front of my eyes while still in the oven.

I tweaked the amounts of butter and sugar, tweaked the amount of flour and eggs, and tried over and over to get it to stop tearing in two.

We created a great easy butter cake recipe.

So I called in the scientists.

Lucky for me, my hubby was an agricultural scientist specialising in all things wheat! So with his baking buddies at the helm, we set out to solve my problem. Armed with the recipe in hand, our group theory was that the cake batter was cooking too quickly on the edges and then pulling on the middle like a tug of war – because it was such a large cake and taking 2 1/2 hours to bake.

Most cakes you will bake will be in a 20cm or 22cm cake pan and this was in a 25cm pan. How could 3cm make such a big difference?

We tried adding a tray of water to the oven to keep it moist while baking and stop it drying around the edges too fast (this made no difference); we tried cooking it longer at a lower temperature (this made the crack worse); and, in the end, we realised it was due to the larger cake pan size. So all we needed to do was increase the volume of the cake batter so that the sides didn’t cook faster than the middle. So simple, and so many cakes later!

My easy vanilla butter cake before and after baking

In the recipe notes, you will see how you can now change the flavour and size of your butter cake with ease.

125 rounds of cake testing later…

I’m pleased to tell you that we created a great easy butter cake recipe that you can not only twist to make the flavour you like, but also twist to cook in different sized pans and different shaped pans.

Now, from one base recipe (using the flavour variation notes on the recipe) you can make:

Rich chocolate cake, orange cake, carrot cake or banana cake.

With a slight recipe tweak (listed in the notes under the recipe) you can also make these 5 cake flavours into:

A 25cm round and serve 15-20 people
A 20cm round and serve 8-12 people
A 25cm square and serve 20-25 people
24 cupcakes

Of course, I’m not going to just share this story with you without giving you the 125-times tested recipe! That would be cruel.

I tweaked the amounts of butter and sugar, tweaked the amount of flour and eggs, and tried over and over to get the butter cake to stop tearing in two.