Non-stick Spray vs Butter & Flour

The Experiment: Does using non-stick spray instead of buttering & flouring a cake pan make a difference in the ability to remove the cake from the pan?

Inspiration: I follow Pioneer Woman's blog and her instructions in baking often include buttering and flouring pans but I'm a habitual non-stick spray user and never flour the pans. I wondered if I was getting worse results because of taking a shortcut.

Expected Results: I expected the process of buttering & flouring to be more time consuming than using the non-stick spray but I expected the results to be about the same.

Actual Results:

Butter Flavoured Pam is my non-stick spray of choice. Lucerne regular salted butter and Robin Hood all-purpose flour are my butter and flour choices.

On the left is the Pam'd pan. And on the right is the buttered and floured pan. I melted the butter and used a brush to spread it around the pan. Then I put a tablespoon of flour in the pan and shook it around to cover the interior. I had to do that a few times to fully cover the buttered surface.

I poured the cake batter into the pans. This is my "Canada Day Cake" recipe. Just looking at these pictures is making me drool :)

Time to bake the cakes....

Here you can see that there is a small difference to be seen in the pans. The one on the left is noticeably browner around the edges. It's almost as if the Pam fried the edges of the cake a little.

Here's a side view. You can see the browner edges. But here's the really shocking part, the shape is different.

The floured pan on the right rose more in the middle but the edges didn't rise much, resulting in a domed cake.

The Pam'd cake on the left seemed to rise evenly all around. There is some rising in the center but the edges rose too giving an interesting wavy but fairly even surface.

Time to take the cakes out of their pans. They both slid out easily with no sticking to the pan. The one on the left has no residue but the one on the right has a floury residue on it.

So which method is best? For convenience and clean results I'll be sticking with my non-stick spray. The floury residue is unappealing and is the real deterrent to using the butter and flour method. The convenience of using non-stick spray is just a bonus :)