Does text-shadow CSS affect SEO ranking by risking a cloaking penalty?
Google penalizes for text that is not visible to the users. White text on a white background can be used for keyword stuffing. In that case the keywords are put in the page source where Googlebot indexes them, but the font color makes it so that users don't see it.
Shadow text is not cloaking because the user can see it clearly. There is no risk of penalty of using CSS text-shadow.