I always recommend weighing your flour when making cake or cupcakes. I use my digital kitchen scale to weigh flour, but if you don’t have one, use the “spoon and level” method to measure with measuring cups. This helps to prevent dry or crumbly cupcakes because it’s all too easy to accidentally compact too much flour into your volume measuring cups."

There are a few key ingredients in this recipe that help create a moist and tender cupcake. The eggs with an additional egg yolk add richness and moisture. The buttermilk also tenderizes as well as adding more flavor (more on that below).

Why is there butter and oil in this recipe?

The main key to ultra moist cupcakes is a little bit of oil! This recipe creams together sugar and butter like most cake recipes, which allows air to whip into the batter for a light texture, but also takes advantage of butter’s unparalleled rich flavor.

We add in a little bit of oil to the butter mixture not for flavor, but instead for MOISTURE! Oil is liquid at room temperature so it coats the palate and gives the sensation of tons of moisture to these cupcakes. It helps to create a texture more similar to box mix cupcakes without the artificial flavor.

I actually recently conducting a baking experiment of Butter vs. Oil in Baking to see how the type of fat used affects tenderness, flavor, and texture in baked goods. The results were SHOCKING. Check out the full article with more side-by-side comparisons like the one below here.