If used in a non-baking context, it is referring to a food that has been poached in milk or in a cream of some sort. In this context, a milk substitute may be used. The most common examples of this include some forms of chipped beef, creamed spinach, creamed corn, and more.

Now, if you are talking about creaming with reference to baking, then you are talking about a process by which butter and sugar are beat/mixed together. Usually, this is followed by the addition of eggs to the mixture. While this is usually lumped together, the creaming actually refers to the process by which sugar and butter are mixed together; as a result, some recipes will refer to this as mixing or beating.

I do not know if creaming can be done with sugar and some other solidified fat. Baking can be as much a technical exercise in chemistry as it is an art. As such, barring more simple changes, I cannot say with absolute certainty whether creaming is possible with a substitute for butter. Technically speaking, though, creaming as a process is more concerned with aerating the ingredients (adding pockets of air). Adding in the sugar also creates a network of sugar crystals, fat, and air that aids in a process known as mechanical leavening. By doing this, the resulting dough should rise more easily when cooked. Though I have not been able to find any scientific papers to corroborate this, a lot of bakers also swear that creaming stretches the amount of product that you will get, which does make sense.

Additional definitions are used exclusively in the dairy industry. When referring to creaming within the dairy industry, one is talking about either the natural process by which fat compounds rise to the top of unhomogenized milk or the process by which these compounds are collected and used in the production of cream.

Lastly, if you want a more scientific definition for the term, then I have to give credit to the Encyclopedia of Food Chemistry, published in 2019. Edited by Peter Varelis, Laurence Melton, and Fereidoon Shahidi, the following definition is given: “Creaming is an upward movement of dispersed globules in a continuous phase due to the density difference between the two phases”. It is also noted that creaming typically occurs during some form of emulsion, which makes some sense given what you’ve read so far.

If you came here looking for something else, get your mind out of the gutter.