Butter and Jam

As we learned, I was making bread.  And a lot of the bread making process involves waiting. And I'm not always the most patient person. While I was waiting for my bread, I tried cleaning my fridge and came across a jar of my favorite cherry jam.

     
"That'd be good on bread,"  I thought.  "But wait, that surely isn't homemade.  I better make my own."  I had cherries in my fridge, so I tried to come up with a way of making good cherry jam.  All my recipes involve the use of pectin. I had no pectin.  So I experimented and googled, and thanks to the genius of David Lebovitz, I came up with this technique.  I made a few tweaks, but that's just fine.  It's not like he used an actual recipe.

Where he used lemon zest, I used both lemon and orange zest.  Where he used white sugar, I used half brown sugar and half splenda.  Would it have tasted better with sugar only? Quite possibly, but I'm working on losing weight.  I also used significantly less sugar than the "recipe" called for, and just cooked it for longer.  It was absolutely delicious. I finished mine with almond extract, not kirsch. Why?  I had almond extract in the pantry. I didn't have kirsch.

I didn't can my jam in the traditional, will keep for ages kind of way. It's delicious, so I fully anticipate using it quickly. I put it in an old jelly jar I have. It was definitely clean, but not hardcore sanitized.  If I were making the jelly to keep for ages, I'd use more proper canning techniques.

The jam turned out amazingly.  It was delicious on toast in the morning, and was also delicious over yogurt. No, I did not make my own yogurt this week. I had a little bit that needed to be used, and instead of wasting food, I used the yogurt.  I'm imagining this jam as a beautiful filling in either lemon or chocolate cake as well.   Of course that's not healthy.

Along with Jam, I made butter.  It sounds WAY harder than it is. I had some heavy cream in my refrigerator, so I threw it into the mixer with a whisk attachment.  It's just like making whipped cream, only we're WAY over-whipping the cream  I made this butter very lightly salted. I generally don't bake with salted butter since I like to control the amount of salt in my food, but on bread, I like the taste of salted butter. I made it salted, since I know exactly how much salt ended up in the butter.

I brought my cream through beautifully whipped, to chunky and overwhipped, and kept it going.  I wasn't paying attention to the mixer. I was shaping the bread loaves.  When i started hearing liquid sloshing -- ok, when liquid sloshed out of the bowl and hit me in the eye-- i turned around and looked. Here's what I had. The liquid (buttermilk), and the butter had separated. I had beautiful, dense butter clumped in the whisk.  I shaped it into a log, wrapped it in saran wrap, and refrigerated it.  It is DELICIOUS.