Adventures in Butter

My house had a surplus of unclaimed whipping cream recently, left over from a bridal shower that someone who doesn't live here had.
I made butter, of course.
The first time, I didn't take pictures because it was pretty spur of the moment, so I took pictures the second time around. You can pretend it was exactly the same, but the first time was better because I put a little bit of sour cream to "culture" the ultra-ultra pasteurized whipping cream, acting on the advice of Sally Schneider that cultured cream is far superior to sweet cream. It is. The sour cream was also left over from the bridal shower, though, and it had turned pink by the time I decided to make the second batch. And everyone was out of yogurt, and they don't really sell much creme fraiche in eastern Washington. So just pretend the second batch had culture in it. It looked the same anyway.
I made my butter in old pasta and jam jars (canning jars work as well, I hear). If you have a stand mixer or some kind of mixer thing that doesn't scare the crap out of you and spit stuff everywhere, you can just turn it on and leave it until it makes butter.

I started with about a cup of cream; it doesn't really matter unless you have a specific amount of butter you need. This made 4-5 tablespoons of butter. If you have cultured milk products, put 1 tsp of stuff in with the cream. If you're using creme fraiche, try half and half like the recipe says and tell me how it works. 

 It expands as it turns into whipped cream; this picture is about 5 minutes in.

 It takes a while to get through the whipped cream stage.

 This is for sure whipped cream at this point. Whipping cream goes through whipped cream to butter. It took I want to say 15 minutes of shaking, excluding the breaks I took (leave the jar in the freezer for breaks).

 

 I think it's butter here; the fat fell out of solution differently with normal whipping cream than with slightly cultured whipping cream. With the cultured stuff and a smaller jar, it sort of thumped out. This one kind of slid out without me noticing, but it was definitely butter when I tested it.

 Next, you strain out the buttermilk, which is fantastic and you should save that, and plop the butter into a bowl of ice water (no icecubes, please, but you can use them to make it cold). From there, you knead the butter to get the buttermilk out. A spatula is an excellent tool here.

You leave a lot of butter behind when you knead it, at least I do. The clean butter is placed on a plate and chilled for a bit in the freezer, and then you can add salt or put it in the fridge. If you used a little more than a cup and don't salt it, you should have the exact amount needed to make half of Smitten Kitchen's Favorite Buttermilk Biscuits. You'll also have the exact amount of buttermilk needed.
The biscuits are delicious.

Eggless Chocolate Chip Cookies

I was craving chocolate chip cookies lately, and I happened to have a recipe that billed itself as "better than sex". I forget where the original came from, but I have it written down as coming from Yeah, That "Vegan" Shit, which does not in fact have a recipe for chocolate chip cookies called "Better Than Sex Chocolate Chip Cookies". 

The ingredients and instructions are pretty much the same, though, so whatever.

VwaV Chocolate Chip Cookies (No, I'm not sure what VwaV stands for. Go google it yourself.)

I halved the recipe, which yielded several cookies. My cookies are not vegan, since my margarine is just whatever was cheapest at winco. 

Ingredients

• 1/2 c butter
• 2/3 c sugar
• 1 1/2 tsp molasses (1/2 tbsp)
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 1/4 c whole wheat flour
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• as many damn chocolate chips as you want

 Instructions

• Set the butter out in the sun in the bowl you want to use (don't unwrap it, there are bugs and dust out there) to warm it up to a reasonable temperature.
• Preheat the oven to 350 F.
• Cream together with white sugar until it's nice and fluffy.

Trusty spatulas work for this.

• Mix in molasses and vanilla

I had my doubts about the molasses. It has such a strong smell.

After mixing in molasses and vanilla, the butter mixture should be light brown, about the color of normal cookie dough.

•  Mix in the dry ingredients. I mix them together first, but you don't have to.

This food blogging thing isn't so hard...

Bam! Dough! It will be softer than normal cookie dough. This will result in thin, chewy cookies. If you're a cakey cookie person, add some flour.

 Let the dough sit while you find your chocolate chips. My pantry shelf is a swamp of winco bulk bags, and I bought these before I bought some other stuff. I don't know if the sitting is necessary, but it might give the whole wheat flour time to absorb some moisture.

Chocolate chips. The Hershey's "special dark" ones are actually the cheapest at walmart, beating out Nestle and Tollhouse, not to mention Ghiradelli.

•  Add as many damn chocolate chips as you want. I follow the school of thought that teaches that there cannot be too many chocolate chips in a cookie, but that chocolate chips should be hoarded as much as possible without sacrificing the goodness of the cookie. I used half a bag for this half a recipe. It was about perfect.

That right there... beautiful.

•  Put on a lightly greased baking sheet and bake for 8 minutes.

When making a new recipe, I make a small first batch to see how long to cook them, how they spread, if they'll stick, that sort of thing.

 While you're waiting, eat some cookie dough. You know you want to. And besides, this won't make you sick, at least until you eat too much sugar and get diabetes.

No fear of salmonella.

 See, could have packed a lot more on there. I left the first batch in a bit too long, so they're kind of stiff now. 8 minutes is about perfect.

Nicely browned. This batch stuck to the pan a little more than I would have liked, so I greased it for the next batch, which used up all my dough.

This is how they should look when you pull them out for minimum stiffness. Make sure they're a little puffy and not too browned.

Blurry cookies!

I hope you enjoy your chocolate chip cookies that could be vegan if you had fancy vegan margarine. I've made a valiant effort to eat too many of them.
Because they are delicious.