Butter or Stork – which makes the best sponge?

For those of us who can't do dairy, whether it's due to intolerance (like me) or dietary choice (e.g. you're a vegan or just want to cut down a bit), we lose out on a lot of things. One of those things, unfortunately, is butter. Thankfully, if you can't have butter anymore or don't want to use it, there are plenty of substitute choices out there. Flora - Flora has been around for donkey's years, although it's only recently gone dairy-free. It's a well-known, well-trusted brand and millions of people buy and use it every year. It's a great tasting product across the board, but the Buttery version is the best of the bunch: I'd even go as far as to say Flora Buttery is the best-tasting option out there. Stork - Stork is another brand that's been around for absolutely ages. It's the granddaddy of them all when it comes to dairy-free spreads: it's been around since the 1920s and it's still manufactured in the same factory in Purfleet to this day. It became a very popular product during wartime and after, as butter was heavily rationed. This popularity was partly driven by the Stork Cookery Service, which published multiple Stork-centric cookbooks that you can still find today. Pure - Pure is another well-known brand. Pure comes in several varieties; sunflower, soy and olive. It's definitely one of the best ones you can find on the market and all the variants are pretty good for every use. While it is a really great product and it has a generally inoffensive taste, it is a little bit high in moisture content compared to butter and other butter substitutes. While this won't really affect your cakes if you're making something like a Victoria sponge, it does create some issues if you're using it to make icing or toppings. If you're using Pure for this, you may need to adjust your recipes slightly to accommodate for the higher water content, such as adding extra icing sugar.

Having salaciously chided the reprobate, I really do have to add a health comment here - apart from the obvious: that cake is for occasional treats if you want to be healthy. While butter is - by law - a pretty consistent product, margarines can contain any healthy ingredient that gives a result. Both must be - by law in the UK - about 80% fat. Maybe that's why the name 'spread', adopted for low fat spreads, is now also used for what used to be called 'margarine'. The basic science behind Charlotte's results above, is that butter, the traditional preferred baking fat for sweets, needs a spread that matches its properties to bake well. That's what Stork has always claimed to match, though the Stork formulation has varied vastly since it began in the 1920s. So, a quickie science lesson. Food fats and oils are all 'triglyceride' mixes. These aren't unhealthy, unless you eat too much, but are the building blocks of a main nutrition source. A triglyceride is a glycerol ion attached to three fatty acid molecules; the kinds of fatty acids involved decide the nature of the fat or oil. The terms 'saturated', 'mono-unsaturated' and 'polyunsaturated' should be familiar to you - they're the different groups of fatty acids, and ALL fats and oils are a mixture. Butter's fat is about half saturated and a fifth monounsaturated; this makes a fat that melts in the mouth or a very warm room, but not in the cold. Light oils like sunflower are liquid to below freezing; very hard fats are mostly saturated and will stay solid in your mouth, sticking to your palate - not a pleasant feeling. So margarines try to replicate this, and it also affects their baking characteristics. Early margarines used soft beef fat and whale blubber with buttermilk (also called whey). Stork today also uses buttermilk - which is why it isn't vegan. Modern spreads like Stork use a mixture of hard vegetable fat (usually palm oil) and liquid oils, varying depending on cost price and consistency. Back a few decades , margarines used partially-hydrogenated oils, leading to them being full of trans-fats. That's now gone, though the dangers of trans-fats were known 40 years ago, but ignored by the food oil industry. Over the last decade, though, trans-fats have quietly and in stages been abandoned - Stork, in a survey I made in 2009, had only 1% trans-fats then - now it seems to be gone. So, Charlotte, your results come partly from the different fatty acids in the spreads and partly from the amount of water in them. The tubs will tell you: total fat content is always stated, and if it's less than 80%-ish, you're getting less fat than you paid for. Hard block margarine is the standard to compare with butter - if a spread has more water, you should add more of it in the recipe. Flora extra-light, for example, has only 18% fat - so it's a waste of time to try baking with it, unless you use FOUR times as much as you would the hard baking Stork! Stork spread and most Pure spreads have 59% fat, so you should add an extra half to get the same fat in the cake; Pure Sunflower has 67% fat, so you should add an extra third. Try it again with the extra water content allowed for - the results might be surprising. I wouldn't know, though, because I rarely eat cake. I' like miseryguts oldhenry, prefer an apple!

I have to ask: why are you looking at cake recipes and their ingredients, oldhenry, if you deplore their use by anyone? Surely, it's just masochistic to stare at the forbidden food when you are a fresh-fruit only person? Alternatively, maybe you're just lecturing those who don't choose only the most healthy options, whatever the occasion...