Simple luxury – Homemade rose & tea compound butter

Isn’t it amazing what can be made out of a simple product – like milk – even without adding anything else, or little. This whole spectrum of dairy products – based on mainly one ingredient! If you think only about the huge range of different cheeses!

The other thing that drives a lot of my kitchen adventures is the fascinating idea to make everday products your own. Not necessarily because it’s cheaper. Just because it feels good, that YOU’VE MADE IT YOURSELF! A victory over food industry…

And I MADE BUTTER! If you didn’t know it already, I have to admit this right away: It’s not rocket science … acutally it’s super simple, … but oh so cool when from one second to another your whipped cream magically turns into something completely different, a different physical state.

Making butter from heavy cream – phases:

As you can see, it’s really simple: Just whip cream until it clots and butter and buttermilk separate from each other. Then press out the remaining liquid and bring into shape. Yes, that’s it!

From this point on there are various ways to use the butter. You could just leave it as it is, perhaps add a few flakes of fleur de sel.

If you choose to add some more flavour and go the savoury path, have a look f.ex. at Nicoles umami butter recipe. A lot of inspiration for different flavoured compound butters and beautiful butter terrines can be found on Look.Listen.Smell.Eat as well!

I went for a sweet compound butter this time. And don’t ask me how I came up with this flavour combination. I just can’t remember when it came to my mind. But what I can say is: this is a really lovely, kind of elegant and not to dominant taste. Perfect for afternoon tea on top of a piece of sweet Hefezopf/challa.

You can bring the butter into different shapes by hand or with the help of moulds. I tried my small chocolate moulds: I filled them with the soft butter, put them back into the fridge, pressed them out of the moulds (not so easy, silicon moulds probably are much more easy to handle) and wrapped them into wax paper – a small one-person-portion of compound butter.

I formed a round bar out of the rest of the butter – simply with my hands. For visual reasons I sprinkled it with some tea leaves and rose petals.

What is your favourite (savoury or sweet) flavour addition for butter?

Rose&tea compound butter
[I forgot to weight the final butter outcome … and now it’s nearly gone. I would say it makes about 100 g of butter]

ingredients
250 g heavy cream, 1 teaspoon icing sugar, 2 teaspoons black tea, 2 teaspoons dried rose petals, dash of salt

preparation
for the butter
Whisk cream until it’s stiff, go ahead until it’s starting to clot, go even further until the buttermilk separates from the butter. With the help of a muslin cloth or a simple kitchen towel press out most of the liquid. If you want to keep your butter pure like this, you could add a bit of fleur de sel. Store in the fridge f.ex. wrapped into wax paper.

making compound butter
Grind tea leaves and rose petals in a mortar until they’ve become powder. It should be about 2 teaspoons. Work powder, sugar and salt into butter. This works best with a fork, when the butter is medium soft (like it is right after you made it from scratch). Bring into whatever shape you like. You can use moulds, form them into a roll, wrapped into plastic foil or do some modelizing by hand. You can decorate the butter with some further tea leaves and rose petals sprinkled on top. Store in the fridge f.ex. wrapped into wax paper.