How to make your own whipped butter

Plain butter is great, but it's awfully hard to spread onto toast when it's cold. Instead of smashing your bread, you can either use room-temperature butter or whipped butter. The latter is sold in stores, but you pay more to get less butter. Solution? Make your own! It's actually not that difficult. I'm lazy, so I know easy when I see it.

What you'll need:

• A mixer (I use a KitchenAid)
• 8oz butter*
• 1/2 cup milk
• olive oil (optional)
• salt (optional)

1. Long before you want to create your whipped butter, take the butter and milk out of the refrigerator and let it sit out for about an hour (this will depend on how hot it is in the room). The closer to room temperature it is, the easier it will be to combine. I suggest you pour out the 1/2 cup of milk you need and put the rest away.

2. When the butter is soft to the touch and the milk no longer feels cold, toss the butter into the mixing bowl. Add a pinch or two of salt if you desire. It brings out the flavor of the butter, which I like a lot on toast, so I add it. Turn on the mixer and beat until the butter is no longer a brick (about 30 seconds).

3. Drizzle some olive oil in. It adds additional flavor as well as softness to the butter, so if you don't like olive oil, you can skip this step. How much you add depends on how much flavor you'd like to add. Turn on the mixer again and beat until some of the oil is incorporated (about 30 seconds).

4. Taste the butter and feel free to add more salt or olive oil to suit your needs.

5. Now add a small portion of milk. You don't want to pour it all in at once because it will splash a lot. It's messy. Turn on the mixer. The butter may harden slightly from the temperature of the milk, but it'll soften up again eventually. You'll know it hardened a bit when some of it sticks to the bowl and forms a smooth surface while the rest of it slides around in clumps. As you mix, the milk will slowly incorporate into the butter and the clumps will start to break up. Add a little more milk and continue mixing. Keep doing this until you've poured in all the milk. You'll know the milk has been fully incorporated when you no longer see liquid in the bowl, and the butter now forms peaks like a thick batter instead of clumpy butter.

6. Find a container to put your newly whipped butter into. It will be a greater volume of butter than what you started with.

Enjoy!

* I prefer to use Kerrygold Pure Irish Butter because it's grass-fed (more nutritious) and it just plain tastes better than most other butters.