A GenX Couple’s Confession
There's a moment in every marriage where you realize you've become the kind of people who get genuinely, embarrassingly excited about making your own butter on a random weeknight. For us, that moment happened not too long ago.
It started, as most of Warren's projects do, with zero prior experience and total confidence.
"I want to make my own butter," he announced.
"What makes you think you can make butter?" I asked.
He didn't really have an answer. He just wanted to make something he'd never made before — which, if you've been following along, you'll recognize as Warren's whole personality. I love cooking and baking. Warren REALLY loves cooking and baking, but more than that, he loves making things he's never made before. I'm a same-old, same-old girl. I have my specialties that I tend to turn to time and time again. He's a new-and-different guy. Even when he makes the same thing he will tweak and change it on the ever present quest for constant improvement. Forty years in, we've made our peace with it.
The Great Plastic Wrap Engineering Project
What followed was fifteen minutes of Warren wrapping our KitchenAid in plastic wrap like he was containing a hazmat situation, muttering about splash radius, while I stood back filming and asking apparently unhelpful questions like "but how are you gonna get the stuff in?"
(For context: this is the same man who once tried grinding wheat in this kitchen and sent it flying across the room. The plastic wrap was not an overreaction.)
He'd been watching a London chef named Adam Byatt make butter on YouTube and decided if this guy could do it in his kitchen, we could do it in ours. So he found the highest milk-fat whipping cream he could get his hands on that day, and it was 36% — (and if you're now Googling milk fat percentages at 9pm, welcome to our world) and got the mixer spinning.
Suddenly We're Butter People
Here's the part that got me. Somewhere in the middle of watching whipping cream slowly transform in that mixer bowl, I turned to Warren and said, "Suddenly we're interested in making butter. Whereas maybe in our 20s and 30s that wasn't exactly a priority."
He just shrugged. "Suddenly birds are interesting too?"
I don't know how to explain it to anyone who hasn't hit this stage of life yet, except to say: something shifts. The small, slow, kitchen-table stuff starts to matter more. Watching your husband gaze lovingly at a spinning stand mixer becomes, unexpectedly, one of the best parts of your week.
He genuinely looked like he was in love with that KitchenAid. I have the footage to prove it. Click the photo below to watch!
Did It Actually Work?
Short answer: yes. And it happened fast — one minute it was whipped cream, the next the fat molecules broke and separated into solid butter and liquid, all in what felt like seconds.
"I learned a thing," Warren proudly said, watching it happen. Then he explained the science to me completely unprompted, which is when I pointed out that he's basically gone from venture capitalist to backyard scientist to bread maker to butter maker. "We all have our gifts," he said. Fair.
We pulled the butter out, gave it an ice bath, split it into two rounds — one salted, one unsalted — and did the first taste test standing right there in the kitchen.
"Like butter?" I asked.
"Like butter," he confirmed. "Smooth. Creamy. I like it."
Then he tried it on bread he'd also made from scratch, using flour he'd ground himself, and delivered this gem: "I like eating the butter I made, on the bread I made, with the flour I ground. Win win. Win win win."
And then — completely out of nowhere — he sighed and said he wished we had a farm. Vegetables, meat, chickens, the whole thing.
I had to remind him he fled his family farm at 17 years old with his childhood dream of being a “business man”, swearing he'd never go back.
"Well... yeah," he laughed.
Forty years married and this man still surprises me. (But I won’t start packing just yet)
Watch the Whole Thing
There's a lot more banter, a lot more plastic wrap chaos, and a genuinely lovely moment of us just standing there together watching cream become butter that doesn't fully translate to words. If you want the full experience (and the farm confession in its full glory), the video's up on YouTube now.
We've since made this butter a few more times — it's become one of those little rituals we didn't plan on but now can't seem to stop. We've even started talking about making our own beeswax wraps to keep it in, which... is a whole other blog post waiting to happen.
If you're a fellow GenX couple who's found yourself unexpectedly thrilled about something as small as homemade butter — we'd love to hear about it in the comments below. Tell us we're not alone in this. Do you find yourselves pursuing things that weren’t even on the radar twenty years ago?
Want to try it yourself? We used the KitchenAid stand mixer. We're not sponsored; we just genuinely use it and love it. This is the KitchenAid stand mixer we use in our kitchen. It's been part of many of our cooking adventures!
If you enjoyed this little slice of our life, come find us on YouTube — we're Happy GenX Couple, and we document the real, unfiltered version of life over 50. Our kitchen adventures are a recurring theme!
He’d never made butter before, but that didn’t stop him. Plastic wrap on the KitchenAid, a surprise science lesson, and a farm confession nobody saw coming: forty years in, we’re still finding new ways to surprise each other.