How To Spread Cold Butter

Some things form a perfect marriage: salt and pepper, peanut butter and jelly, doughnuts and croissants. Two ingredients, however, that should be kept in opposite corners of the ring? Cold butter and warm toast. Rather than suffer through ripped bread or randomly scattered lumps of hard butter, here are two tricks that allow you to butter your toast and eat it, too.

Grate butter over the toast: Treat the butter like cheese for quick spreadability. It will buckle upon contact with the warm toast and be instantly ready to slather. Kick it up a notch by following with a quick grate of bittersweet chocolate and a sprinkle of cinnamon, and you've got a recipe for a morning done right.

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Use steam power: Fill a cup with water and microwave for 45 seconds. Carefully remove the cup, dump out the water and place the cup upside down over a slice of butter on a plate. Within a minute, the residual heat trapped inside the cup will soften your pat of butter to a perfectly spreadable room temperature.

Now that's a greenhouse effect we can get behind. And if you start this trick while your bread is in the toaster, it won't add any extra time to your toasting experience.