For the culinary mom, making customized flavoured butter is a sweet and simple gift. These little discs of homemade flavoured butter are the perfect thing to throw into a dish for cooking or baking – and it saves mom the time needed to chop up all those herbs. Isn’t time the best gift of all?
You need: Herbs, parchment paper, containers, a cookie cutter, a pot, and a whole lot of butter.
1 Melt butter over low heat. Meanwhile, wash herbs and chop finely. Thoroughly dry herbs and soak up any extra moisture.
2 Add herbs to the butter. Proportions really don’t matter – add as much or as little as you want!
3 Line a shallow container (I used sandwich containers) with parchment paper. Pour in melted butter to about half an inch deep. Refrigerate
4 When butter has solidified, lift it out by grabbing onto the edges of the parchment paper.
5 Run your cookie cutter under very warm water to heat the edges, then slowly cut shapes into the butter. You may need to reheat the cookie cutter in between each one.
6 Package in a lovely gift box and keep cool until gift giving time.
Herbs you can use:
- oregano
- dill
- chives
- lavender
- thyme
- mint
- sage
It doesn’t have to be just herbs either. You can also try:
- sun dried tomatoes (pictured)
- vanilla bean
- bacon
- dried cranberries
Just be sure your ingredients are very dry. I tried raspberries but all the juice stopped the butter from congealing properly, leaving me with a crumbly mess.
What would you put in your flavoured butter?
Lovely! I’ll be trying this with garlic and chilli flakes and use them for cooking up fish.
That would be perfect!
These look perfect! I’m definitely going to try my hand at making these for an upcoming birthday gift. Great idea xo
Thanks so much for this recipe. I tried this recipe following your instructions and I liked how it came out. I made a photo collage of my process and put it on my blog. You can see it here with a reference back to your blog:)
http://markersandthread.blogspot.com/2013/05/tried-true-diy-flavored-butter.html Thanks again!
Looks fantastic!
you made them look so cute in the round shape! love it!