Making Accidental Butter

The other day I was making a refrigerator cake, the easiest,  most delicious edible summer arts and crafts project of all time.  To make, you simply whip some heavy cream with a little vanilla and sugar.  You then take store bought chocolate wafer cookies and make stacks of sandwiched whipped cream and cookies.  You then lay all of the stacks next to each other and mortar them together into a large brick of whipped cream.  Wrap it up and put it in the fridge, and this blob of smothered cookies will magically become a cake in a few hours.

This perfect summer dessert is light and fresh and does not require you to turn on the oven, thus lighting your house on fire from the inescapable heat.  Turning your oven on in summer is a horrible, painful self-destructive thing to do.  Baking anytime during the day, while the sun is still out and hot, is suicide.  You can try to bake in the morning and catch the world before it warms up and leave your kitchen a sauna for the rest of the day.  You could attempt to bake at night, but by the time your house has cooled off enough for it to seem healthfully acceptable to heat it back up again, you will barely be able to stay awake through the clanking of the mixer, and it is highly unlikely that the timer will be able to penetrate your slumbering.  I'm mildly disappointed that my house does not have air conditioning thus making it okay to bake in summer, can you tell?

Anyway, the cookies become soggy and mesh with the whipped cream, creating a perfect striped slice of chocolatey sweetness.  So, once upon a few days ago I decided to make one.  It was a sloppy mess, trying to stack them.  Very finger-licking fun.  However, my whipped cream was behaving a little funny, it was a little runny and strange.  Before I frosted the outside of the stacks into a log, I decided to rewhip the whipped cream.  It was then that I realized what was wrong; It was over-whipped, not under whipped.  It began to clump and cling to the paddle of the mixer while the other half of it became a milky puddle in the bottom of the bowl.  I had to leave my refrigerator cake naked, but in return I got butter.  It was a fun surprise.  I put the cake in the fridge confident and right in knowing that it would still taste just as fantastic.

I was given this fantastic accidental butter, but it was not enough.  I added some sea salt and honey and then pulled out my secret weapon.  I have of late, but wherefore I know not, acquired some lavender sugar.  For the past year I have been trying to experiment with it in recipes, but with little success.  From lemonade to profiteroles, nothing has quite given this new and exciting ingredient any chance to highlight it's unique flavor, until now.

Honey lavender butter.  It is delicious.  A milder butter flavor than anything you could buy in the store, but the salt, lavender, and honey give it a perfect balance of flavors that are delicious on bread and toast (which are different?).  It has gone on top of so many biscuits, cookies, and banana bread that I'm becoming mildly distressed as my store of it is rapidly depleting from my fridge.