Accidentally Melted Your Butter In The Microwave? Revive It With One Ice Cube Trick

You have a sudden urge to bake cookies, and thankfully, you have everything you need on hand. But the butter needs to be soft, and all you have are rock-solid fridge sticks, so you pop it in the microwave for a few seconds to soften... and you end up with a melty mess. While it may seem tempting to toss it straight into your mixer, it's typically not the best idea. If your recipe doesn't specifically call for melted butter, using it could throw off your bake's texture. Thankfully, there's a simple way to make it right — you just need an ice cube (seriously).

Take your bowl of melted butter out of the microwave, add an ice cube (or a few if you want to speed up the process) and get ready to watch the magic happen. Give it a stir, and you'll see the butter quickly return to a semisolid state. Once that happens, remove as much of the water from the now-melted ice cube as possible, as extra water could throw off your recipe. 

An important point: just because your butter looks like it's back to it's pre-melted state doesn't mean that it'll act exactly the same in your recipe. Butter is actually an emulsion of fat and water, and when it's melted, the fat and water separate. The changes that occur once the emulsion separates can't be undone, even after your butter is returned to its solid state. For some recipes (like pancakes, muffins, and other liquid-heavy baked goods), the bit of extra water won't make much of a difference. For pickier recipes (like cakes and pastries), it's likely not worth the risk of using once-melted butter.

The best way to soften butter is simply to be patient. But that's not always ideal. Throwing it into the microwave can get the job done, but that's when you run the risk of overdoing it. You can try Mary Berry's go-to technique to soften butter quickly — she cuts it into cubes, then places the cubes into lukewarm water (just make sure you dry the cubes off before tossing them into your recipe). If you'd rather not use water, you can soften butter faster with an unexpected kitchen tool: your cheese grater. Simply grate the butter and let the grated pile sit out for a few minutes to soften.

While all of these hacks work, none of them are quite as fast or easy as tossing a stick of butter in the microwave for a few seconds, so you'll eventually try it again. And when your microwave decides to go turbo and you end up with a pool of melted butter, remember that all hope for beautifully-textured cookies isn't lost. Simply toss an ice cube in the butter, give it a stir, and you'll be good to get your bake on.