I forgot to mention this previously, but I have a great new blog design thanks to my wonderful husband and his new freelance business, Heavy Digital. He was able to take the header that my friend Katie made for me and use that for the inspiration for the new design. I’m happy to have something that is much more reflective of my personality and the aesthetic I enjoy.

This week’s entry is an exercise in futility. Why, you ask? Because I made butter for no good reason and now I’m about to show you how to do it as well. And before you get too excited, it’s not special butter or anything. Just regular ol’ butter you can get at a grocery store for a few bucks. The problem was that I had too much heavy cream leftover from Christmas [long story short: my husband was a saint and went out in search of whipped cream for me at about 9PM on Christmas Eve, couldn't find any, and instead brought home 4 pints of heavy cream for me to use for homemade whipped cream] and it was about to go bad, so I tried to think of creative ways to use it up. And now we have butter.

I was honestly a little dumbfounded by the thought of making butter from ‘scratch’; for some reason I never really thought about the process involved, and I guess I must’ve missed that part of the field trip we took to a farm when I was 6 years old? I remember milking a cow, but I do not remember churning butter. Either way, allrecipes.com did not fail me when I simply entered “heavy cream” into its ingredient search – there were several versions of homemade butter on there.

The whole thing seemed pretty easy so I decided to give it a go. While some “recipes” called for weird things like glass jars and marbles, I just decided to dump the heavy cream into my KitchenAid stand mixer and hope for the best. The internet told me this would take anywhere from 5 – 25 minutes, although there wasn’t much to specify why there was such a variable in time. So I got home and went to work.

Homemade Butter
1 pint of heavy cream

Pour heavy cream into bowl of stand mixer; I used my new 3 qt bowl and it worked great. I’d probably go for a bigger bowl if using more than 1 pint of cream. Set the mixer to 8 and let it do it’s thing. It’ll get to the whipped cream stage pretty quickly and then it needs to go past that, which can take awhile. Here’s a very important step that you may want to follow, that I did not: don’t leave your mixer unattended and/or uncovered. I only say this because half of my kitchen ended up splattered in undoubtedly delicious, and mostly unusable, buttermilk.

Once the buttermilk has separated out and you start to see solids in the mixing bowl, you’re pretty much done. You’ve made butter. Now you get to squeeze out all the excess buttermilk and then rinse it off with water to ensure that all of it is gone. If you don’t do this step, you’ll still have homemade butter, but it’ll spoil pretty quickly. By squeezing out/rinsing off the buttermilk, this will be fine to keep refrigerated for about a month. After this, just put all the pieces together and form into whatever shape you’d like or put it into molds or add some fresh herbs or cinnamon and honey. The possibilities are really endless.

Would I do this again? Probably not. It was a lot of mess/work for something I can easily buy and while the taste is really creamy and fresh, I don’t think it’s something that bears repeating. I will, however, say that I did boast about my butter-making quite a bit at work that week. Because really, who makes homemade butter?