give me back my BUTTA

Ok, when you mess with the quality of my sweets, that's when I draw out the guns!!!

Recently I found various confectionary/cake shops cutting corners, in an attempt to reduce cost and boost profits. I used to like cream puffs from Cozy Corner...until I tried their awful dry Madeleines...UGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH, give me a slice of bread with honey over that awful baked sweet any day! I checked out the list of ingredients and sure enough, they had not used butter...it's evil but seemingly innocent cousin, margarine was used in its place.

It just is not the same without butter. Cookies, cakes, any baked goods taste really 2-dimensional without rich real butter. Some things like banana bread are in itself quite aromatic and can stand on its own (w/out butter)...but we're talking madelaines and white loaf bread.

I went to the supermarket to check out packaged, pre-sliced loaf bread and sweet breads...ALL of them (this is no exaggeration, I mean ALL) had margarine as one of the top ingredients. Even BUTTER rolls...ohhhhhhh, the painful irony. Scary too, considering how much and how often I ate such breads. Here, in Japan you can buy a big tub of margine, something like 450g for 200yen (2-bucks) but butter is, on average 350yen (3-bucks) for a mere 200g. I suppose it only makes sense that food producers are opting for the cheaper of the two.

In case you're wondering, American Wonder bread contains soybean oil...neither margarine or butter...interesting. The best thing about having a bread machine is I can make loaf bread with the REAL stuff, that is, butter. (and sometimes olive oil for Italian loaf bread...yum!)