Butter

Last weekend I tried making butter. I started with some heavy whipping cream in a jar that I handed to the girls.

Valerie jumped around with it for a while and Cordelia took a turn at shaking it, as did I, but I ended up "cheating" and using my KitchenAid. It started with whipping cream:

Then it became whipped cream:

Then you could see the buttermilk coming out.

It would run out of the stuff in the attachment. It started looking rather chunky, then I strained out the milk.

It didn't come together like butter as I had expected until I put it back into the mixer to get more of the milk out:

You then put it in a bowl of cold water and knead it a bit to get the last of the milk out (I guess any milk left in it makes it go off more quickly).

When the water stays clear, you're done. I took some of the butter and added honey to it:

Yum! Of course I also had to make bread to go with the honey butter. I ended up with 1 pound, 10 ounces of butter from a half gallon of heavy whipping cream. I also ended up with a fair amount of buttermilk. I froze 3, 4 oz pats of butter wrapped in parchment paper and all of the buttermilk (but not in parchment paper). It was neat to see the change from cream to butter, but it took much longer than I had expected, even in the KitchenAid. I will probably do it again, but not for a while. We don't really use much butter and I need to figure out what to do with the buttermilk first.