Makin' Butter
February 2, 2004

James and I decided to try our hands at making some butter. We had originally planned on doing it on Saturday, but I got a little behind and had to postpone mine. I finally got around to it today and was thrilled with the experience. I decided to give honey butter a shot, so let's see how it turned out.

The Supplies: A canister, 1 pint heavy whipping cream, and honey. When I do this again, I'll make sure I have a bigger canister.

Step 1: After opening the cream carton, pour it into the canister.

I didn't use the entire carton of cream. I filled it a little over halfway full.

Step 2: Add ingredients. I added approximately 2 tablespoons of honey but it turned out to not be enough. If you are making honey butter, I would recommend around 4 tablespoons.

Step 3: Commence shaking!

After about 10 minutes or so, it began to get tough to shake. I opened the lid and found that it had take on a sort of whipped cream consistency.

A few more minutes later, it began to solidy slighty.

Somehow, a diaphram ended up getting inside my canister.

Finally, the butter separated from the buttermilk.

Step 4: Drain the buttermilk.

Step 5: After I drained the buttermilk, I went ahead and shook it another 2 minutes to make sure all the buttermilk was separated.

Step 6: Admire your butter. Here, you can see I've created a nice dollop.

Here's a close-up of my dollop of honey butter!

I smoothed the butter as best I could in the bottom of a tupperware container for chilling.

All in all, not a bad batch. As I said earlier, I should've added more honey, but I'll know better next time. The whole process took about 25 minutes for me to complete; about 18 of those minutes were spent shaking.