I don't like to use shortening but my favorite ginger cookies won't work with all butter. I had to use a mixture. Butter melts at one temperature, shortening melts over a wider range of temps so cookies with shortening don't spread as fast as ones with all butter. (different lengths of the fat molecules or something like that. There is also a difference between saturated and unsaturated fats because of the double carbon bonds in unsaturated fats. The double bonds put kinks in the fat chains so they don't fit together as nicely. This is one of the reasons vegetable oil is liquid at room temp and animal fat isn't. Lots of interesting organic chemistry here.)

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