Monkeys and Butter

I dream of one day owning a camera worthy of creating fantastic photos of food. Because maybe then I could branch out and just have a food blog. That would be awesome.

You see, the thing about this stage in my life: 'Limbo' as I like to call it, is that not much is going on that is blog worthy. I could bore you with stories about my classes. But...they bore me and I'd rather not discuss them. I don't have children so I can't hop on the Mommy-Blog bus. I'm not married, don't have a mortgage. I can't even knit...so there goes that marketable blog niche.

Honestly, I'm no longer an interesting person.

I don't drink, so there are no wild and crazy parties to write about. I have no juicy love life. If I had been blogging my actual 'life' over the last several weeks it would have gone a little something like this:

I went to class today, stopped by the grocery, made dinner for MY PARENTS (loser), watched CNN and went to bed. (Also, wah....why is my life going nowhere? *insert whine, and tears here*)

The end.

But I bake a lot. I do a lot of cooking. That I can write about. That might actually be interesting. Except that little detail: all the interesting food blogs are interesting because the photos are good.

And my camera is a lovely piece of shit.

Heck, maybe if I had a decent camera I'd be a food AND photography blog. Omg....creative juices are FLOWING in my brain right now. (Must continue to hint at camera for Christmas. Not too old to resort to begging my parents.)

For now I will suck up my pride and share the shitty pictures. Because I made butter. And monkey bread.

Butter

So, I took a small carton of heavy whipping cream and poured it into a bowl with a tight lid. And...I began shaking. And shaking. And then I handed it to Jon and he shook it some more. After about 10 minutes or so of shaking you hear a solid part begin to form and a lot of sloshing going on:



The butter is beginning to form and the liquid is....*drumroll please*...Buttermilk (Go ahead, tell me I'm a genius). You can either pour off the buttermilk and save it for baking (or drinking if you are like my late grandfather who loved the stuff) or pour it down the drain like I did.

Secure the lid again and shaking some more, you want to really remove all the buttermilk. If not, this will cause the butter to go rancid faster.



Keep shaking, keep pouring.

Eventually little is left to pour off. At this point cover the butter with a splash of cold water. Begin to 'massage' (mix around in the water) the butter with a spatula. This will help really remove all of the buttermilk. Drain off the water and repeat the process until the water is clear.



Pour off all excess water and spoon the mixture into a ramekin or other storage device. Add a little salt if you prefer salted butter.

Monkey Bread

I made the butter because A) I've really got nothing better to do and B) I had made homemade yeast rolls to go with beef stew and homemade butter sounded heavenly.

But the yeast roll recipe (the one I shared before) makes A LOT OF ROLLS. And I didn't really need a lot of rolls. So, instead of putting the last of the rolled balls of yeast dough into muffin tins, I used the remainder to make monkey bread.

I rolled each ball into a mixture of cinnamon and sugar. Layered them haphazardly into a greased bundt pan and allowed them to double in size:



Then I mixed up 1 stick of butter and 1/2 cup of brown sugar and brought it to a boil on the stove. I poured that mixture over the risen yeast and baked it all at 350 for about 20 minutes.



After it was done cooking I immediately turned it out onto a plate. You don't want it to cool and stick to the pan.



And so then, as if there were not enough calories involved already I mixed up 4 ounces of cream cheese, half a stick of butter, 2 cups of powdered sugar and a tsp of vanilla to make cream cheese icing to dip the monkey bread in.



Sometime after that I stapled my mouth shut and burned my cookbooks.

The end.