You are in the kitchen with all of your ingredients, ready to prepare your recipe. As you begin to read the directions aloud, you stop as you read “room temperature butter”. We have all been there! It’s not fun to realize your baking must be postponed – but does the temperature of your ingredients truly matter?

The short and most precise answer is, YES!

Many of our Crafty Cooking Kits® require butter to be room temperature for everything from cookie mix to frosting mix. We don’t do this to be cruel, room temperature butter does yield the most desirable results!

When it comes to cookie mix, utilizing the proper temperature butter helps to maintain the consistency of the dough during the rolling and cutting process.

A smooth and creamy frosting mix also depends on the temperature of your butter. Utilizing fully melted butter in a frosting recipe will yield watery results. Unless you anticipate utilizing the frosting as a glaze, we would suggest you always make sure to bring your butter to room temperature before mixing into the other ingredients. This process will yield a thicker, more decadent frosting!

Even cupcake mixes benefit from using room temperature butter. Butter at this temperature blends better with the other dry ingredients, resulting in a more even distribution throughout the batter. Now and then a recipe may call for melted and cooled butter. Be sure to let the melted butter cool as directed to avoid adding too much liquid to the batter. In this instance, the natural oils in the butter would need to congeal slightly after melting for the best results.