Berry Scones and Homemade Butter

Last Saturday, we watched Tyler's Ultimate on the Food Network, and once again, chef Tyler Florence made our mouths water with his recipes. One of the things he made in this episode was Berry Scones with Orange Honey Butter, and they looked so good, I knew we had to try them.

The one thing he did during the episode that really intrigued me was when he made butter from scratch in the food processor. Wow--I didn't realize you could do that! All it takes is a quart of heavy cream, whipped until the cream separates into solids (butter) and liquid (buttermilk).

In the recipe, he also adds a pinch of salt, some orange zest and some honey to flavor the butter. We did make the recipe as written, and the scones and orange-honey butter turned out FANTASTIC.

However, the kids also wanted to see if they could make good ole salted butter, so we tried that afterwards. All it took was a quart of heavy cream and about 2 teaspoons of salt. At first, the cream turns into whipped cream, but you have to be patient and wait until it completely breaks down and separates. Tyler said it would take about 4 minutes, but my processor must be a lot less powerful than his, because it took closer to 9 minutes. Once everything separated, we took the butter solids out and drained it on some cheesecloth (the buttermilk in the salted version is icky so we dumped it).

Tomorrow morning, we'll have the scones with the orange-honey butter, and my picky 9-year-old will have a bagel with homemade salted butter. If you're looking for a fun, quick project in the kitchen with kids, making butter is a good one to try.

NOTE: More photos to come...as I was uploading additional photos for this blog post, my laptop's hard drive crashed and died. R.I.P. little MacBook.