Homemade Butter using a Jar {Boredom Buster}

As part of my on-going adventure to include my kids in crafting, and in an effort to help prevent Summer Boredom, I decided to try a really fun crafty experiment that involved food!  Yum!  We LOVE crafting with food or creating yummy treats at our house but I decided to actually break out of our normal sweet food and go for something a little more savory.  We decided to make our own Homemade Butter: using nothing but our own strength and a jar! (well and a few ingredients too of course!)

When I heard you could make your own butter, all I could picture was a large old fashioned wooden churn...and I was just mystified.  I had soooo many questions rushing through my head including why would I want to do that, where would I get a churn, do I have to buy one or can I rent one, and oh man my husband is not going to be happy about having to store a churn.  My husband is very very sweet and supportive of my crafting and design craziness, but a churn would take it to a whole new level!

Thankfully, I found a great blog post from Plucky Momo on making your own butter with a jar.  Oh.  I have one of those!!

You Will Need:

• heavy cream (as much as you want, the more cream, the more butter you will make!)
• pinch of salt (optional)
• marble
• jar or other tight sealing container 

So following the instructions on her blog post I took my heavy cream and poured it into my jar with a pinch of salt.  (For some reason a glass jar worried me a bit so I used a freezer jam jar).  Added my marble.

And we shook.

And we shook.

And after about 15 minutes of shaking...my jar started to look like this.

And after another 5 minutes of shaking or so...I had BUTTER!  Well, sort of...

I looked inside and part of it definitely had gotten thicker, and there was a separate liquid and solid part, but it didn't quite look like butter.  

So I squeezed it together using a spoon to try to get the butter to stick together.

It worked, but not quite well enough.  So I used my (clean) hands and squeezed it together over a sink so that the excess liquid would come out and the butter would meld together.

And then it looked like butter!

If you put it in the fridge for a bit, it will harden up just a bit more and will be the texture, consistency and taste of butter!  YUMMY!


Who knew making butter was so easy?!  And I got a bicep workout in the process 🙂

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