Usually I'm not the one to talk about butter around these parts. Faith is well known for her love of serving mini-pats of butter to her dinner guests and sometimes she even molds them! They're just too cute, but we ran across an idea recently that makes homemade specialty butters into great gifts and easy to serve with that warm crusty bread and your big bowl of soup!
Homemade compound butters are easy to whip up and add a little something special to your next dinner party (or even night at home). Sure you can roll them up in a log and slice off pieces, or even mold them into pretty little shapes. But if you don't have the same patience that Faith does, why not try a cookie cutter?
When pressed into the cutter they would make amazing hostess gifts for winter get togethers or punch out shapes to sit on small plates tableside. It's the same idea as a mold, but the ability to spread your newly made compound butter into a single later on a baking sheet (covered with parchment) and make use of your cookie cutters is fantastically simple!
You can check out this idea over at The Gift of Goodness blog which is making a push this season for goods with real butter in them. There's recipes and extra tips if you're looking for a few more thoughts on the idea.
Related: Quick Tip: Use Compound Butters In Baked Goods
(Image: The Gift Of Goodness)
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if you use a cookie cutter wouldn't that be huge shapes of butter?
in high school our dinners had fresh whipped herb butter or garlic butter that was piped out of a pastry bag and then chilled they were wonderful and before attending that school I never had warm bread and butter at every meal.
How do they get that butter so airy and light? I could never recreate it. I might have to go back to school and ask the chef's.
After you pressed them in the cookie cutters, put them in the fridge, let them get stiff . . . press the butter at one end, so that it peeks out of the cutter, slice it . . . repeat until you're done.
@schang
You just have to whip it for a long time. What I do, is make sure the butter is room temp, toss it in my kitchen aid stand mixer with the paddle on and turn it on a medium speed a d walk away for like 10 minutes. I'm sure it only needs like 5 minutes really, but I got stuff to do.