This butter cake recipe project has been a long time in the making!

My mother-in-law has always insisted that the traditional butter cake is still the best whenever she is served some fancy new cake for the thirty-something years that I have known her. I had always assumed that this very basic old-school cake was easy to make so I never really thought about trying to perfect it.  After all, there are already so many “Best” butter cake recipes online, surely it was just a matter of using someone else’s tried and tested recipe! But, I soon realized that even though there are only four main ingredients, viz butter, eggs, flour and sugar, there are an infinite number of ways of combining and proportioning the ingredients!  I tried many of the published recipes online and was never satisfied that I got want I wanted.

Here is a summary of what I wanted in a perfect butter cake recipe.

Taste/Texture/Aroma

1.  A wonderfully buttery aroma and flavor 2.  The crumb should be finely textured, not too crumbly, moist and melts in your mouth with just a slight pressure of the tongue on the palate. 3.  It must go well with a cup of coffee or tea and leave you wanting another slice.

Dimension/Shape

I wanted a cake that can be served as a slice which is approximately 2cm thick and about 9cm by 6cm.  The dimensions are important.  A 6cm high cake will ensure that you take two bites with each bite having one side with brown crust.  The brown crust adds a lot of caramel flavour to each bite which on average should be 3 by 3 cm.  That means that a 9x6cm slice will yield 6 bites each with at least one side with the crust.

Rec...