Cupcake Decorating 101: Frosting - Butter or Shortening?

I got a lot of favorable response from the Cupcake Decorating Tips post I decided to follow it up with another interesting topic - when making buttercream, shall we use butter or shortening?

I have been asked many times so I thought I'd decicate a post about it. We won't be tackling the nutritional value of shortening or butter in this post but mainly pointing out the difference between butter and shortening in terms of cupcake decorating purposes.


Butter is roughly 80% milk fat, 18% water and 1-2% milk solids. It's basically made by churning cream or milk. Resulting butter has a pale yellow color. 

Vegetable shortening is 100% fat, snow white in color and doesn't require refrigeration.

Using the Basic Buttercream Recipe and a clear extract, let's see how butter and shortening will fare side by side. The following images will show buttercream made from purely butter (on the left) and purely shortening (on the left).


(1) Color
Buttercream made from purely butter will have a slightly yellowish tint while buttercream made from purely shortening will have a snow white color.

(2) Piped Frosting
When using butter, when piped into a cupcake it will look soft and heavy and will form a beautiful pointed soft tip on top once you release the frosting. When using shortening, piped frosting will be light and fluffy and will basically hold its shape. However, it will not form a beautiful pointed tip on top.

(3)  Tinted Frosting

When tinted with a hint of soft pink gel food coloring from Americolor, I'm not sure if you see it but the butter frosting has a slight yellowish tint bordering on orange while the shortening frosting shows a "just right" soft pink color. When using pure butter, you will probably have problems when using tints as pink (it might slightly look orange-y), red (will also look orange-y) and blue (it might look greenish) but you'll have no problem tinting it with yellow, purple orange or green. When using shortening, since your color base is purely white, any tint added will just pop out nicely.

If you ask me what I use, I always use 100% butter basically because I love the taste of butter. It adds a certain depth of buttery goodness to the frosting even when you layer it out with other flavors like lemon, mint, chocolate or cream cheese. But an advantage shortening has is that it heightens the flavor you put into it. Vanilla is more vanilla-y, lemon is more lemony or mint is more mintly without the buttery flavor getting in the way.

Now, this is a question I am always asked. How do I keep butter from melting especially that we live in the the always sunny Philippines?

There is a process called crusting. The longer a frosting sits, it will eventually form a crust or an "outer layer skin" that hardens and protects the rest of the frosting. So as long as I don't pipe my cupcakes very near an operating oven, frosted cupcakes should be fine. This has always worked for me. 

But if you're not particularly confident using purely butter, you can always try and experiment with a butter to shortening ratio that could work for you, 50% butter / 50% shortening, 25% butter / 75% shortening or 100% shortening. It's basically up to you. 

If you want to use pure butter but not quite confident that it'll hold it's shape especially during transporting cupcakes to your location, you can always add more powdered sugar (or if you don't wan't it too sweet - substitute it with powdered milk).

I'd love to know your thoughts on this. Are you a butter or shortening user? Or a combination of both? How do you keep your frosting sturdy till it reaches its destination?