Woo Hooo! I got lucky! I went to my local grocery store and they were out of Crisco (small town) being desperate, I purchased Shurfine Shortening. Now I've used this brand before for fried chicken but never for frosting. Going to try it out before I use it for a customer's cake to see what the difference is. Is there anything I need to be aware of insofar as shortening with transfat vs. shortening without it? I use the Viva buttercream recipe by RaRaRobyn.

Thanks!

No, it doesn't. I was stoked about it having transfat so I double and triple checked before I bought it.

It has-
Partially Hydrogenated Soybean and Cottonseed oil, Vegetable Mono- & Diglycerides

It gives the percentage of Transfat as 2.5 g per serving.

I am so confused as to why transfats are a good thing???!? Can somebody please help me by explaining what this does for the buttercream?

For some reason the transfats seem to help keep the buttercream from breaking down, for shortening-based icings. I've seen dozens of "Help Me!" posts from people who made their icing as usual, using the new 0 tf Crisco, only to have the colors separate, or else the icing simply slide off the cake. Don't know anything at all about the food science behind it, but I seem to recall reading here that even Crisco acknowledges that your icing recipes may perform differently now. However I've never seen any issues posted regarding BAKED items being affected.

IndyDebi actually uses Dream Whip powder in her icing to combat the no-transfat problem. Because guess what Dream Whip has in it...transfats!

Sorry I can't answer your original question dieamondsonblackvelvet since I rarely make shortening-based icing, but hopefully someone else will relate their experiences about using tf/0 tf shortenings...

I use Richtex shortening. So far so good.

I add 3 TB meringue powder to every 1 cup of shortening w/o Transfat. This stabilizes the icing so the shortening doesn't separate.

I don't know if they've modified the recipe yet, but Target's brand of shortening had trans fat the last time I bought some.