butter v soft margarine

[Tailtwister]

I'm making a Mary Berry Christmas cake recipe and have just noticed she calls for soft margarine and not butter. Does butter/margarine weight translate directly? e.g- if she calls for 225g of soft margarine, will the equivalent of butter do?

I have a dim and distant memory of hearing her say she often uses margarine in her cakes rather than butter, but I do like the flavour of butter and in any case have already bought it in.

I tend to do half butter and half marg. Marg makes the cake much lighter and a kind of springier texture, but I like the flavour of butter better. I stick to the weight suggested in the recipe.

That's a good idea, the best of both worlds! Which margarine do you use Kitten?

I always use Stork margarine for cakes. As Christmas cake has so many spices and flavourings I don't think I would be able to tell whether it had butter or margarine in.

And yes, the weights are the same.

Use same weight, I find in a sponge my cakes sink a little if I use butter, I stick to Stork, my neighbour uses whatever marg is on offer she's an old fashioned baker like Mary B

I use flora :)

I use stork in all my cakes BAR Christmas cake! I suppose I think it's got to hang around for quite a few months weeks, so better put something real in it (as it were).

I use flora buttery for everything :)

The advantage the soft margarine has is that it is soft straight from the fridge and butter is not, so you'd need to soften your butter first if you were going to cream it with sugar.
I think that you could use the 'soft butters' that exist these days as well in baking.

Thanks guys! I will try margarine as per the recipe. I've never used it, so it will be interesting to see the results. I think I've been brainwashed into thinking butter is the the one and only!

i swap directly -weight for weight- but the end result is slightly different for obvious reasons, margarine has more water than butter, butter has more fat. Sometimes i find if i've swapped directly the end result is as someone else said slightly denser (sinks a little). I also can find it at times too fatty tasting.
Stork only has 59g fat, flora buttery 70g and butter 81g fat. I like the compromise of using half and half. I vary which fat i use for baking, don't have any one i always go for, really depends on what i'm making and what the recipe says.

The lidl and aldi soft butters(beautiful buttery/heavenly buttery) are every bit as good if not better than the soft stork for baking.I use them all the time now for baking-very light and fluffy textured cakes.