Sweet Kid-Made Butter
Fun-Da-Mentals Kitchen Skills
- shake :
to rapidly and vigorously move a covered container filled with food up and down and side to side to combine ingredients and create a different consistency, such as shaking whipped cream to make butter.
- stir :
to mix together two or more ingredients with a spoon or spatula, usually in a circle pattern, or figure eight, or in whatever direction you like!
Equipment Checklist
- Large jar with tight fitting lid
- Liquid measuring cup
Ingredients
Sweet Kid-Made Butter
- 1 pint whipping cream (sub dairy-free butter)
Food Allergen Substitutions
Sweet Kid-Made Butter
Dairy: Substitute dairy-free butter for whipping cream in Kid-Made Butter.
Instructions
Sweet Kid-Made Butter
fill + shake + shake more
Fill a good-sized jar with a tight-fitting lid with 3/4 cup of whipping cream. Have the kids shake, shake, shake until it becomes butter. It can take over 5 minutes … just when they think the butter will never work, keep on going! Sing songs. Tell Jokes. Tell some silly 'cantaloupe' jokes (see below)!
shake more + thunk + slosh
When the cream becomes too thick to shake, and it seems like nothing is moving in the jar, it means that you are nearly there! Keep going! Soon you will hear a "thunk" and a "slosh!" Wow! You just made butter! How totally amazing is that?
whisk + slather
Take off the lid and drain off the excess liquid from the butter. Next, have kids whisk 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract and 1/8 cup of honey into the freshly made butter and slather on your just made Cantaloupe Cupcakes. Yum!
Hi! I'm Heavy Cream!
"I'm not a lightweight, like half and half. I'm full of fat and pour out much thicker. You can also call me 'heavy whipping cream.' The names refer to the same thing! Did you know that I can transform myself with your help? I turn into a fluffy topping to put on cakes and pies when you whisk me as fast as you can (or you can use a mixer). However, I go through an even bigger change when you shake me really hard in a covered container for a few minutes—I turn into butter!"
- Heavy cream is the thick, high-fat liquid at the top of raw milk. It naturally separates from the milk, rising to the top. It is skimmed off and then pasteurized to kill bacteria, which makes it safer to drink and lasts longer.
- Heavy whipping cream is made up of about 36 percent fat. In comparison, regular whipping cream is 30 percent fat, and half-and-half averages to about 14 percent.
- Heavy cream whips up better as a topping if the cream is cold, and pouring it into a cold mixing bowl before whipping also helps.
- The Guinness World Record for the most people simultaneously whipping cream by hand is 1,434 and was set on August 22, 2015, by employees of the Swiss company Nordostmilch AG in Bürglen, Switzerland.
- A dollop of whipped cream is great on fruit, cakes, and pies. The tallest recorded dollop so far was over 7 inches atop a mug of hot chocolate!
- Some of the foods heavy cream is added to include cakes, frostings, ice cream, salad dressings, sauces, soups, sour cream, scrambled eggs, chocolate ganache, crème fraîche, panna cotta, and homemade cheeses.
- One-half cup of heavy cream contains 43 grams of fat, 3 grams of protein, and the minerals calcium and phosphorus. It has more of the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K than lower-fat dairy products. Fat-soluble vitamins are more easily absorbed by your body when eaten with fat.
History of Butter!
- First churned at least 4,000 years ago, butter became an essential food. As the story goes, it all began one hot day when a Nomad tied a pouch of milk to his horse's neck and later found the heat and jostling had churned the milk into a tasty yellow product.
- Before butter became exclusively used as food, people used it as money.
- For years, butter was only made at home by mixing cream in a container to form butter lumps. Then, as the butter became thicker, the liquid buttermilk was drawn off, and the butter was washed and removed.
- Butter churns evolved from skin pouches to earthenware pots that would be rocked, shaken, or swung with whole milk or cream inside to separate the fat.
- Eating butter increases the absorption of other nutrients in foods. Because butter is made from milk or cream, it has more nutritional benefits than margarine, a butter-like spread made from vegetable oils. In addition, butter has been around for centuries, where margarine has been around for less than 200 years.