Homemade Blueberry Lavender Honey Butter

I don’t remember much from that trip, but the one thing that sticks out in my head (besides my dad making me run around the hotel to stay in shape for the tournament) is a lady churning butter. Like the old school way in a barrel, by hand.

In the 17 years or so since that day, I’ve always had this impression that making butter took hours, required a ton of arm strength and patience, the latter of which I do not have.

Fast forward to 2014 and I started a kitchen bucket list pinterest board. I haven’t made a ton of progress on it since (except for these homemade pretzels!) but one of the first things to get pinned was homemade butter. Not like making flavored butter by bringing a store bought stick to room temperature and mashing it up with stuff, but like churning cream to get butter from scratch in my house minus the 1800s dress attire.

So in the spirit of switching things up and not grabbing the 4 sticks from the refrigerated section of the grocery store this time around, I grabbed a quart of heavy cream and decided to make my own butter. A quart makes a decent amount of butter so I split it in two and did half with just some plain sea salt and made a homemade compound butter with fresh blueberries, lavender and honey with the other half. Not only is the blueberry compound butter amazing (you’ll want to slather it on everything. I literally put it on these road trip cookies as a snack because…why not?), but the whole process was just so fun to watch. In just about 15 minutes, cream goes from soft peaks, to a heavy whipped consistency to breaking down, turning yellow and separating from the buttermilk to form butter. All you need is a stand mixer (and some plastic wrap because this process gets quite messy at the end!) and you’re ready to churn!