After reading How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World we decided to try our hand at making Homemade Butter.
Materials
- Heavy Whipping Cream
- Empty plastic jar with screw on lid
Your jar should be at least 2x as big as your carton of cream. In our case, we used an 8oz carton of cream (1/2 pint) and an 18oz peanut butter jar. I recommend using a plastic jar over glass, as a safety issue. Also, I recommend a lid that screws on tightly, to prevent a very large mess 
Finally, the jar should have a wide mouth, so the butter can be easily scooped out.
Step 1: Pour the cream
Pour the cream into the jar and screw the lid on, tightly.
Step 2: Shake!
Since the cream was still a liquid, the shaking started out pretty easy. After about 5 minutes, our cream had turned into whipped cream that looked like this…
The next 5 minutes were a little harder, as the cream became thicker and thicker. After a total of 10 minutes of shaking the cream had reached the top of the jar and looked like this…
At this point we took a break and tried some of our ‘butter’ on bread. 10 minutes is a long wait for a very excited 3-year-old
I took over all the shaking for the last 5 minutes. I found that holding the top side of the jar in my right palm, at about shoulder height and then swinging it down to hit the bottom of the jar on my left palm at about waist height worked the best for me. I suggest you experiment to see what is comfortable for you. I did hear a satisfying ‘thwack’ each time the butter slid to the bottom of the jar. After our last 5 minutes (so 15 minutes total), we finally had butter.
…and buttermilk.
We poured off the buttermilk (saved it for pancakes) and we were done!
If you don’t expect to eat the butter within a few days, then it should be rinsed. To do this pour ice cold water into the jar, screw the lid on and shake the jar to ‘wash’ the butter. Pour the water out of the jar and your butter should now be safe a little longer in the fridge. I’m sure ours will be gone in less than a week…