Can You Use Butter To Grease Your Bundt Pan?

Baking is an art of patience. After spending anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours preparing something to be baked, all you can do is wait with a watering mouth as the sugary, cakey aromas waft from the oven. Finally, the timer dings, the toothpick comes out clean, you let the cake cool, and flip the pan over to release the baked beauty — and you realize you forgot to grease the pan. Greasing a pan is a crucial step to ensure all your hard work is fruitful. In the case of a bundt pan, where there is more cake-to-pan surface area, greasing the bundt is all the more important.

Jerrelle Guy, author, artist, recipe developer, and creator of the blog, Chocolate for Basil, gave us her preferred fats to grease a bundt pan with. "Nonstick cooking sprays or solid fats like butter or shortening applied with a pastry brush are ideal, because they promise a more even application of fat, instead of risking pooling liquid fat at the bottom," she explained in an interview with The Takeout.

Explaining her method for an expertly greased bundt pan, Jerrelle Guy notes that flour should always be applied in tandem with any kind of fat. The flour creates a barrier between the cake and the pan, ensuring a clean release. Granulated sugar has a similar separating effect, Guy notes, adding that she "actually prefers to dust with granulated sugar over flour most times because it creates a crisp, caramelized edge and pretty color."

Flour can sometimes leave an unpleasant whitish hue on darker cakes that can ruin their appearance. One of the numerous benefits of using a bundt pan is its decorative impression on a cake, so it's important to not compromise that. For darker cakes like chocolate or red velvet — which has baffled consumers for decades with speculation about what its flavor really is — Guy advises that you use cocoa powder rather than flour. The cake's dark color camouflages the added cocoa powder while the granules serve to help you easily extract the cake from the pan.