Homemade Butter & Sour Cream

A few weeks back, Stephanie at Make It From Scratch wrote about making homemade butter. Ever since, I've been dying to try it but I had just bought butter at the store. Wouldn't you know it! Last week we finally ran out which gave me my excuse to try making butter. It's easier than I thought.Pour some heavy cream in a clear container (so you can see the magic)-a clean pasta sauce jar, water jug, etc all works perfectly. Simply shake shake shake. Shake shake shake. Shake your jar! You have to shake through the cream stage till it separates. If you get tired of shaking, get the kids to shake or kick the jar around the house a while. It took me nearly two hours to turn a pint of heavy cream into butter. Once you've shaken your arms silly, you will be left with nice creamy butter with a buttermilk by-product. I've had a rather rough weekend but my intention was to split my butter in half. Half would be left plain but I wanted to add a little EVOO (extra virgin olive oil), garlic powder and oregano to create a spreadable garlic butter with the other half. Like I said, I've had a rough few days so I'll get to that later in the week.

I also made some homemade sour cream. This was really easy and can be done a couple of ways. You can use a little of your buttermilk by-product and whip in some heavy cream till you get the consistency you like. I wasn't crazy about this version so I chose another route. I added a bit of lime juice (I didn't have any lemon juice on hand) to plain heavy cream and whipped it up. It turned out perfect! You can control the tartness of your sour cream a little better and it tastes more like the store bought stuff without the unpronounceable chemicals and hefty price tag! Next time I'll try adding lime juice to powdered milk reconstituted into a heavy cream. I'll be sure to update you on the results from that experiment!What did you make this week?

As usual, I'll be linking up to Blissfully Domestic, Tempt My Tummy Tuesday, and Kitchen Tip Tuesday so be sure to check out what the other domestic divas are cooking!