By Golly, Make Your Own Almond Butter!

After I wrote about using almond butter as a facial scrub, my lovely friend and food blogger Stephanie from Make It, Bake It, Buy It, Fake It made the huge mistake of commenting on how much she’d like to prepare her own. Thus began the pleading for a guest homemade almond butter tutorial on Crunchy Betty. Well, she has done that, and MORE! This is a tip-filled instruction guide on how amazingly easy (not to mention SO much less expensive than store-bought) it is to make almond butter.

A couple of quick notes: It makes sense that this is a great facial scrub (and also great with honey as a sandwich), as a plethora of beauty recipes call for ground almonds as a scrub – this just takes it one step further and into a paste. Either way, it’s going to soften and beautify your skin. Secondly, if you prepare it to eat (and add salt), you can still use it on your face, even with the salt. It might cause a wee bit of drying, but it shouldn’t bother normal to oily skin one bit.

Without further ado, I give you the kind, genuine, and ever entertaining Stephanie!

Homemade Almond Butter

First of all, this is what I call a “non-recipe.” Here it is in a nutshell: You throw some nuts in the food processor and let it run until what’s inside it looks good enough to spread on toast. Or in this case, good enough to smear on your face. The fact that you can do either makes me downright giddy. I love stuff that does more than one thing. It multitasks so that you don’t have to. Sweet.

There are only a few little particulars about making your own almond butter that you should keep in mind:

• Two cups of almonds will yield approximately 1-1/4 cups of almond butter.

• Almond butter will taste better if you toast the almonds first. If you are starting with raw almonds, spread them in a single layer on a baking sheet and put them in a 375° oven for 10-15 minutes. Give them a stir at the half-way point. Don’t leave the room! As soon as they smell insanely good, take them out and let them cool. If you bought roasted almonds, you don’t have to do a thing to them.

• Planning on eating some of the almond butter? You’ll probably want to add a bit of salt to it (unless your almonds are already salted). Add a little at a time toward the end of processing and taste it. Go from there. Just remember that you can always put more in, but you can’t get it back out.

• The amount of time it takes to process almonds into almond butter depends a lot on how powerful your food processor is. If the almonds are raw, they may take a little longer (another reason to start with toasted or roasted). Mine took about 6-7 minutes total (stopping twice to check and add salt).

• The finished almond butter must be stored in the refrigerator. It should last a couple weeks in an airtight container, depending on how many beauty treatments you do and how many snacks you have.

• Oh, and you’ll probably want to stay away from any “flavor coated” almonds if you’re doing facials with it. You know, like Chili-Lime or Candied-Spice. I’m just saying…

Stephanie Talks About … Hair!

Some of the recent topics here on Crunchy Betty have been dealing with fails, mistakes, oopsies and home-beauty blunders. It got me thinking back to my days as a teen and pre-teen. Kind of frightening, I must say. As a youngster, I tried all the DIY beauty things they suggested in the magazines. Especially the ones for hair. I did the coffee rinse (“for brunettes only!”), the beer rinse (just what you want to smell like at 14, right?), the mayonnaise hair mask (a bit “icky”), and finally … The Egg White Hair Mask. That, right there, was the end of my home beauty experimentation. The heels dug in, the arms crossed, and the head lowered with the kind of squinty-eyed pained look that only 14-year-old girls can do justice to. “Never again,” I vowed.

Just what was it that possessed the writer of that beauty feature to omit the oh-so-important warning that the water you rinsed this stuff out of your hair with should be … COOL water??? As in,  DO NOT use warm water and DO NOT — FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THINGS CRUNCHY — use HOT WATER!

Can you guess what happened? If you said, “OMG! The egg white cooked! You must have had little bits of cooked egg all through your hair!” you’d be all too correct. I won’t go into how long it took to get it all out. I won’t tell you what it was like to walk around with the ghost-smell of cooked egg wafting around you for what seemed like, you know, for like … ever.

With all the rinses and masks (homemade and store-bought) that I tried on myself, my hair never seemed to be any softer, shinier or more manageable. But then, I was 14. Of course they didn’t “work.” I had no need for them then! My entire being had experienced only a few short years of elemental exposure. I may have (desperately) needed help styling my hair, but it was shiny and healthy all on its own, without interference from me or the cosmetics companies. This is why I think beauty and fashion magazines can be ever-so-slightly dangerous for girls. Hmm, that sounds like a good subject for Crunchy Betty to tackle, doesn’t it? Instilling healthy beauty habits (and sense) in teens.

So, you may be asking, “What does all this have to do with almond butter?”. Absolutely not a thing in the world. Unless you put it in your hair, which would mean that you missed your face. But that’s okay … it’ll wash out.

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Be sure to leave Stephanie some comment love here, and don’t forget to check out her heartfelt writing/delicious recipe pairings at Make It, Bake It, Buy It, Fake It!

Thanks, sister from another mister! Crunchy Betty is so much better for having you here. Mwah!