Kids love making butter! There’s a real magic in taking cream, shaking it up, and getting delicious homemade butter in the end.
How to Make Butter With Kids At Home
Kids love the magic of turning cream into butter! Learn how to make butter at home – quickly and easily. No butter churns are needed!
Making butter is easy! Here’s what you need:
- Cream. We like to keep this UHT cream from Trader Joe’s on hand at home for activities like this.
- A container.
- A clean marble. This isn’t strictly necessary, but it makes the butter churn a lot more quickly!
If you want a special treat, add a little bit of maple syrup to make a lightly sweetened butter that tastes absolutely delicious on fresh bread.
Put a little cream into the container. You don’t want to fill it more than halfway; one third works best in our experience.
Add a marble, and hand it to your child.
Now they just need to shake, shake, and shake!
It’s really cool to see the cream magically transform into butter. Here you can see that two of the containers have undergone the transformation, while the third (on the right) is at more of a whipped cream phase:
And here are all three containers, each with their pat of butter sitting in some (mostly skim) milk:
Nothing tastes better than homemade butter on homemade bread!
We could barely taste the maple syrup in our butter, but it sure made the leftover milk taste amazing!
Have you made butter before? I highly recommend it if you haven’t – just use a small amount of cream for the size of the jar – the shaking is more effective that way.
We especially love making butter on Thanksgiving. It’s the perfect way to keep little busy while everyone else is cooking!
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MaryAnne lives is a craft loving educator, musician, photographer, and writer who lives in Silicon Valley with her husband Mike and their four children.
curious..how long does it take to make butter? (how much shaking?)
Depends how much cream you use. It goes faster with less cream in a larger container. I would say anywhere from 2-8 minutes when we have done this.
Oh, how neat that you are a blogger for Alex toys. We love their craft products like, for example, washable makeup. Making butter during hurricane sounds like a good way to pass time.
We’ll have to try their washable makeup. I am thrilled to be working with them, because I think they are a fantastic company with great products.
Too bad amazon here doesn’t have the book!
Maybe they’ll get it, someday…
I’m trying to think of what my favorite products from them is, and I’m thinking we have some of their dollhouse toys……. You ever notice how as soon as you’re asked that you forget what you like?
How fun to make butter and congrats on Alex Toys!!
Thanks! I love their company, so I’m thrilled to be working with them!
Homemade butter on homemade bread – yum! I do really like the Alex toys I have seen and believe it or not we can get some of them here! We have the water flutes that you can fill to different levels to get different tones. My girls adore them.
We don’t have the water flutes – I’ll have to try them. They look neat!
I have heard of Alex Toys! I think the play cooktop that I bought for the kitchen set Jeremy made Emma G years ago was from them. What an exciting sponsorship! I’ve made homemade butter once. SO good! Even better on homemade bread.
They have a great play cooktop that I’ve been eying! I’m really excited about working with them!
Never heard of Alex before, browsing their website now. Looks like they have great options for creative and science-y kids!
I think they are a great company; I’m very happy to be working with them!
Love Alex toy products! My daughter has tried a number of the activity sets they have (and we also enjoy giving those as birthday gifts!). I didn’t realize you were a blogger for them – they made a great choice with that! :-) And real butter — love when kids can learn that there are so many food items that can be made and don’t have to be packaged and bought at a store.
I’m thrilled to be blogging for them! We often give their activity sets as birthday gifts, too – I actually discovered the company a few years back when Emma got one of their sets from a friend for her birthday!
What an exciting sponsorship!
We make butter and use the resulting buttermilk for pancakes. I hadn’t thought about adding maple syrup! Homemade butter is so nice for spreading, as Johnny is demonstrating on that delicious-looking slice of bread.
I bet that buttermilk makes delicious pancakes! The maple syrup makes it taste amazing. And I am very excited about working with ALEX Toys!
Our next FIAR is Cranberry Thanksgiving..and we have this on our list of “to do”! “)