Better Butter

I shall begin this post by declaring that what may appear as my creative genius, is more often than not the mimicked efforts to keep up people who do cool things. This being said, my latest notion was to make butter. Despite yesterday's high winds that blew my baseball cap off and much miserable pollen up my nose, I was determined to return home from my errands and make butter! I read about it being super easy and had to try it for myself. Some people make it in their blender, but you can make it with a mixer, too. I tried the latter and thoroughly enjoyed myself.

What ingredients you'll need:
Heavy whipping cream.

Yes.
That's it.
Truly!
Okay, so if you want it more flavorful, you'll need a smidge of finely ground sea salt.

How to make it:
Begin by pouring the whipping cream into your mixer. Beat the cream on a high setting for a few minutes until it becomes whipped cream. If you wanted it to stay this way you'd have to keep a very close watch on it because a few churns too many and it gets grainy. However, for our purposes, KEEP ON BEATING!
Next...more beating. If the cream is still at a stable thickness, now would be a great time to grab a kitchen towel. It seemed to take the longest time, but in total I had my mixer on high for about 5-7 minutes. During that time I draped the towel around the top of the bowl because it quickly transitioned from cream to whipped cream, to curdled cream (which is where the buttermilk separates and will splatter out), to the final butter stage! Once the buttermilk separates, the butter will cling onto the whisk. You'll need to pour all the contents through a strainer to completely divide the milk and butter. Give it a few squeezes to press the milk out and voila - it's ready to be consumed! The butter needs to be kept in an airtight container or else it will absorb any odors that may be surrounding it. Fresh butter will be good for about 2 weeks.

In the end, this project was SO simple and quite a bit of fun. I used some of the butter for our dinner last night. It was for scones so I mixed it with grated and fresh squeezed lemon juice, a tsp. of finely chopped English thyme (from our herb garden!), and a smidgen of powdered sugar. YUMM-O! :)

If any of you make butter, lemme know!


Cream in the mixer


Whipped cream


Curdling cream


Holy cow, Batman...we've made BUTTER!!!