Cranberry honey butter bumps up the homemade goodness of the holidays to a new level. And the good news is: it’s only about 2 minutes of extra work. (Two minutes of well spent investment!) Trust me on this one.
There’s something magical about honey and butter together. Creamy sweet goodness. But add some dried cranberries and a touch of orange to the mix and everyone is going to want the recipe. (Or beat them to it and make them their own jar of cranberry honey butter to home for leftovers. You will be their new hero.)
Here’s all you need:
1 cup butter, softened
1/3 cup finely chopped dried cranberries
1/4 cup honey
4-6 drops food grade Wild Orange Essential Oil (here’s how to get them at wholesale prices), or 2 teaspoons grated orange peel
1/8 teaspoon salt
Throw the butter into a bowl and mix it up a bit with a mixer. Add the rest of the ingredients, blend until well mixed.
That’s it. See how easy it is?
You can store it in the fridge for a couple of weeks (don’t worry, it won’t last that long) or freeze it for longer.
Some friends and I recently celebrated ‘Friendsgiving’ and we used this butter for the meal. We put it in 1/4 cup canning jars and tied it with string and a cute little wooden ‘spreader’. They used it for their bread at lunch and took the rest home for later. They loved it. It was a great party favor.
If you really want to go ‘all out’, make your own butter. I like to make my butter with whipping cream. I know, it’s not really from scratch–but I don’t have any milk cows and I don’t know of a good source for local raw cream, so the a carton of whipping cream is the best I can do. (Bonus points: It’s a fun activity to do with kids–go from ‘milk’ to whipped cream to butter. Like magic!)
To make butter from ‘modern scratch’ get a couple cartons of the small size of whipping cream (in the milk section of the store–just the straight cream, in a carton that you can pour). Throw the COLD cream into a COLD bowl and mix it with a stand mixer (you really don’t want to beat this with a hand-held mixer because it takes a long time). Turn it as high as you can without everything splashing out all over your kitchen. And let it blend for a while. First, it will form whipping cream (like the fluffy dessert kind without the added sweetener), then it will eventually start turning yellow. Finally, the butter will separate completely from the watery liquid in the bowl.
Once it separates, the butter will cling together in chunks. Pull out the butter and dump the liquid. Squeeze the butter in your hands to wring out any extra liquid. Put the butter back into the bowl and add the above ingredients to make your cranberry honey butter. Mmmm. Mmm. It’s tasty.
Whether you make your own butter or use already made butter from the store, the results are fabulous and your guests will thank you for those extra two minutes you took to make this delicious cranberry honey butter.
