Cream shortening is a type of vegetable shortening with a smooth, spreadable texture specifically designed for baking applications where a light, airy result matters most. It’s softer and more pliable than regular shortening straight from the container, making it easier to blend with sugar and other ingredients. You’ll find it used heavily in buttercream frostings, cake batters, and cookie doughs where texture is everything.
How It Differs From Regular Shortening
All shortening is a solid fat made from vegetable oils (typically soybean, palm, or cottonseed oil) that have been hydrogenated or otherwise processed to stay solid at room temperature. What sets cream shortening apart is its consistency. Regular shortening, like the kind you’d use to grease a pan or make a pie crust, tends to be firmer and waxier. Cream shortening is whipped during manufacturing to incorporate tiny air pockets, giving it a lighter body that’s closer to softened butter in feel.
This pre-aerated quality means cream shortening blends more readily when you beat it with sugar, a process bakers call “creaming.” Those air pockets act as the foundation for leavening in cakes and cookies. When your batter hits the oven, the trapped air expands and helps the final product rise evenly.
Why Bakers Choose It Over Butter
Butter contains about 80% fat and roughly 15 to 17% water. Shortening is nearly 100% fat with no water content. That difference has real consequences in baking. Cookies made with shortening hold their shape better because there’s no water turning to steam and causing spread. Cakes stay moist longer because shortening doesn’t release moisture the way butter does during storage.
The biggest advantage shows up in frostings. Buttercream made with cream shortening holds stiff peaks in warm kitchens and won’t melt or slide off a cake sitting at room temperature for hours. This is why bakeries producing decorated cakes for weddings and events often rely on cream shortening as a base, sometimes blending it with butter for flavor while keeping the structural stability shortening provides. The tradeoff is taste: shortening is essentially flavorless, so frostings made entirely with it lack the richness that butter delivers.
Common Types and Brands
The most widely available cream shortening in the United States is Crisco, which sells an “all-vegetable shortening” that works for creaming applications. For professional and serious home bakers, high-ratio shortenings like Sweetex and Hi-Ratio are popular choices. These products are formulated to absorb more sugar and liquid than standard shortening, which is why they’re called “high ratio.” A cake made with high-ratio shortening can hold more sugar per cup of flour, resulting in a finer, more tender crumb.
You’ll sometimes see cream shortening sold in tubs rather than sticks or blocks, reflecting its softer consistency. Some versions are also available in a bright white color (as opposed to the slightly off-white of standard shortening), which matters when you’re making white buttercream and want the cleanest possible color without adding food dye.
How to Cream Shortening Properly
Even though cream shortening is already softer than standard shortening, technique still matters. Start with shortening at room temperature, around 68 to 72°F. If it’s too cold, it won’t trap air efficiently. If it’s too warm, it loses structure and your baked goods come out flat.
Beat the shortening alone in a stand mixer or with a hand mixer on medium speed for about 30 seconds until it looks smooth and slightly glossy. Then add sugar gradually, continuing to beat for 3 to 5 minutes. The mixture should become noticeably lighter in color and fluffy in texture. This visual change tells you that air is being incorporated properly. Scrape the sides of the bowl at least once during this process, since shortening tends to cling to the edges and not mix evenly.
Under-creaming is one of the most common baking mistakes. If you rush this step, your cakes will be dense and your cookies will spread too much. The creaming stage is doing the structural work that baking powder and baking soda finish later.
Nutritional Considerations
Shortening has historically gotten a bad reputation because of trans fats. Older formulations relied on partial hydrogenation, a process that created trans fatty acids linked to increased heart disease risk. Since 2018, the FDA has effectively banned partially hydrogenated oils in the U.S. food supply, so modern shortenings are formulated differently. Most now use fully hydrogenated oils blended with liquid oils, or palm oil, to achieve the same solid texture without trans fats.
That said, shortening is still a calorie-dense, highly processed fat. A tablespoon contains about 110 calories and 12 grams of fat, with a higher proportion of saturated fat than most liquid cooking oils. It contains no vitamins, minerals, or protein. For everyday cooking, liquid oils like olive or avocado oil are generally considered healthier options. Shortening’s strength is specifically in baking, where its unique physical properties produce results that other fats can’t replicate as easily.
Substituting Cream Shortening
If a recipe calls for cream shortening and you only have butter, you can substitute at a 1:1 ratio, but expect changes. Your frosting will be softer and more prone to melting. Your cookies will spread more. Your cake may have a slightly different crumb. Adding a tablespoon or two of extra flour can help compensate for the water content in butter.
Going the other direction, replacing butter with cream shortening in a recipe that calls for butter will give you more structure but less flavor. Many experienced bakers split the difference, using half butter and half shortening to get the best of both: good flavor with better stability. For frostings, a common ratio is about 50/50, though some bakers prefer two-thirds shortening to one-third butter when working in hot climates or for outdoor events.
Coconut oil is another option for those avoiding hydrogenated fats. Refined coconut oil is solid at room temperature and can work in some creaming applications, though it melts at a lower temperature than shortening (around 76°F), making it less reliable for frostings that need to hold up in warm conditions. Lard, while technically a shortening in the broad sense, has a distinct flavor that limits its use to savory applications and certain traditional pastries.