Baking with Spreadable Butter

Can packaged spreadable butter be used interchangeably for sticks of butter in baked goods?

Spreadable butters are simply regular butter with vegetable oil added to make them soft directly out of the refrigerator (they become liquid at room temperature). Through taste tests, we’ve detected slightly off, chemical flavors in these products right out of the fridge. But are they acceptable for baking? To find out, we baked a cake that called for softened butter, biscuits that called for cold butter, and cookies that called for melted butter with both spreadable and regular butter. The spreadable butter was used directly out of the refrigerator for the cake and biscuits, and it was melted as instructed for the cookies.

The spreadable butter produced a “squat and gummy” cake, compared with the tall and fluffy stick-butter version. Similarly, the biscuits made with spreadable butter were “heavy as a rock” because the mixture doesn’t get firm enough to be distributed in small pieces like chilled stick butter. The cookies made with the melted spreadable butter had good texture, but all three recipes made with the spreadable butter had the same off-putting flavors we detected in their raw state. We do not recommend spreadable butter in any application.