Making Homemade Butter: FAIL

After learning about life in America during colonial times last week, we were to going make butter this week.  I had directions in my teacher manual to put some heavy cream into a jar and shake for 20 minutes. Then I went to the internet to see if anyone else put their butter making experiences out there. 

They did. 

We watched lots of butter making videos. Some people shook it in a jar while others used food processors and electric mixers. We thought we were set to go ahead and give butter-making a try using the food processor. 

Here's what happened:

I was all ready, with camera in hand, to make butter, take pics and show off our butter making experience. 

I didn't know I was going to broadcast a FAILed experience! LOL

Anyway...

We poured some regular heavy whipping cream into the food processor. After about 3 minutes, we stopped to see if we had whipped cream yet. 

It was not quite whipped cream; 'twas a little thicker but not whipped cream consistency. Drippy drippy off the spoon. 

So we turned the machine on again. After about 5 minutes, we checked again. The substance looked a little more like whipped cream. On again we go.....

  

So after about 10 more minutes, it looked like it was beginning to separate. We left the machine on after that and watched the outside of it until we saw the butter clumping and the butter milk separating from the butter.

We never really saw that happening. So we checked it again and decided we needed to scrape down the sides. 

We mixed more and it never turned to butter and butter milk. 

So, not knowing what in the world I'm doing, I thought that maybe the mixer was too big or we didn't have enough heavy cream, so I decided to transfer to my teeny food processor.

You'll never guess what happened after that! 

After mixing in the itty bitty processor, the cream turned into liquid. All liquid! No thickness. No clumps!  What in the world?!?  

At that point I decided to pour into 2 mason jars. 

I thought maybe we needed to shake by hand. So the kids shook and shook. They took the jars outside and ran around the yard with them and shook, shook, shook and shook some more.  This whipping cream never got passed thick cream, but not even to whipped cream consistency. 

We spent a total of 45 minutes trying to turn this cream into butter.  Ach!

I don't know if we used the wrong kind of whipping cream or if the cream was bad, or if we mixed too much or if maybe I shouldn't have let it sit out at room temp for a bit before we started. Whatever the reason, we did NOT make homemade butter! 

I can only laugh. This was quite the experience. 

Linking up with Fellowship Fridays.