Homemade Butter

Did you ever make butter in school?  I vaguely remember doing this in kindergarten, however when we did it I just remember wanting to eat it.  Anyway I wanted to do this with my girls for a couple reasons.  One I think it is neat that you can actually make butter just by shaking cream, and two because I think this butter is healthier than the store bought butter (it has nothing but cream in it, no oil, salt, or colors added) and my girls LOVE butter.

I saved a peanut butter jar a while back and since it was plastic and had a good lid I thought it would be perfect to let the girls shake up their butter.  It worked great, since they ran and jumped around shaking their butter.  Who knew this was going to be so much fun!  I really thought I would end up having to do all the shaking but nope they did it and had a blast (see pictures below to see how much fun they had).

However when we did our second experiment and tried to make butter out of skim milk to test the difference and see if you really did need the fat to make the butter.  The girls were less thrilled at this point about shaking the butter.  I think they had enough and I ended up having to do most of it this time.

After we made our butter and talked about the experiment I made the girls pancakes for dinner and they ate them with just our homemade butter no syrup at all!  I think we will be making a LOT more butter from now on since it is so easy and the kids like it. 

What is happening with this experiment? Heavy cream has a lot of tiny fat droplets in it.  When you shake the cream the fat droplets are slammed together, when they are slammed together with enough force they stick to each other.  As you continue to shake more and more fat sticks together and eventual form what we call butter.  With the skim milk, there is no fat so when you shake the milk just foams up and after a little time will just go back to it's liquid state. 

Supplies
Heavy Cream
Skim Milk
Jar with tight lid

Directions

 Pour 1/2 cup of heavy cream in a jar with a tight lid 

(um maybe I should have let the older child pour the cream in)

 Now shake it

 Shake some more

 Feel free to bounce with it

 Then bounce some more

 Maybe even try running with it

 After about 5min you will have butter

(I think it was less time though, you would not know it with all the stuff the kids did in that time)

 Now pour 1/2 cup of Skim Milk in your jar

(lesson learned, no spill this time)

 Then shake 

(yeah it is not as much fun shaking the 2nd time around)

 After about 5min compare the two

The skim milk just foams up, it never thickens and turns into butter

 And now you have a jar of homemade butter to eat!