When baking it’s good to use what you have on hand if possible. Switching one kind of fat for another sounds like an easy enough change, and it is! If you know what your working with. In the original Blue Berry Buckle, shorting is used as the main fat, as explained here. However in most cases I prefer using butter.
When changing ingredients it’s important to know what their made of. Shorting is 100% fat while butter is only around 80% fat. So that means our recipe will have a little extra water content if we make a direct swap. To accommodate this you could melt the butter down, this allows some of the water to evaporate off during the baking process, however this will likely make a thinner, more liquid, cake batter as you won’t be able to whip air into the wet ingredients as well as with shortening. The other option is to remove about 2 tsps of the milk used when adding the dry ingredients. This will allow you to use solid butter to create an emulsion with the wet ingredients.
