Handmade Butter

This is a cheeky way to churn cream into butter. Spend an hour together with your little ones (or big ones) having a play. The butter never lasts long enough to reach its expiry (about 10 days), the creamy deliciousness after such hard work is a wonderful reward.

You can do this in a group, a class, friends, a party, or use it as your daily exercise! This isn’t meant to deliver you with your butter supply regularly, but now and then for a little whimsy it’s a fun activity to try. Pair it with our favourite bread recipe for an afternoon of homemade, hand baked delights.

Ingredients to make 2 loaves (one for you, one to give to a friend or neighbour):

• 1 pot of heavy cream at room temperature (double cream or whipping cream works best, single is fine but you’ll have to work hard for it)

• 1 jar with a screw top lid

• ice cubes

• cold water

• spatulas x 2 or butter paddles

• somewhere to wash your hands afterwards

• greaseproof paper to put your butter in when it’s done

Method

1. Begin by putting your cream into the jar and putting on the lid tightly.

2. Shake the jar

3. Keep shaking

4. Shake it some more

5. You’ll be shaking for around 10 - 15minutes passing through these phases

   1. Cream

   2. Thick cream

   3. A big blob of cream

   4. A big blob of cream with milky liquid coming out

   5. A hard blob of butter with buttermilk at the bottom of the jar

   NOTE: You’ll find that the first two phases go really slowly then all of a sudden you’ll have a blob of milky butter in the jar instead of cream.

6. Open the lid and drain out the buttermilk (save it to make buttermilk scones or pancakes)

7. Tip out your milky butter blob into a bowl of icy water and rinse. Squeeze out as much of the buttermilk as you can. Repeat this process 2-3 times until no buttermilk is left in the butter. If the buttermilk is still present, put the butter back into a clean jar and shake for a little while longer. The buttermilk is what makes the butter spoil quicker (if it lasts long enough for this to be a problem) so getting out as much as you can at this stage is helpful.

8. Mix with whatever you’d like the butter to taste like…

   • wild or bulb garlic

   • cinnamon sugar

   • salt

   • fresh herbs from the garden; rosemary, chives, thyme

   • honey

9. After you’ve mixed it with your flavours, tip it onto the greaseproof paper or use your spatulas to shape the butter. A long log shape, a square shape, whatever suits you best.

10. Tuck in with freshly made bread!

We used the Kilner Butter Churn recently, it wasn’t great. The pictures below are of our very optimistic attempt using it then ditching it in favour of the good ol’ jam jar… we preferred simple glass jars to make our butter. Plus it was way more fun and interactive for everyone involved.