Cowboy candy butter with roasted corn

A delicious addition to your BBQ

Welcome to the third installment of our corn series. Today we’re making cowboy candy butter: hot, sweet, and a little wild. This recipe is a three-in-one—candied jalapeños (cowboy candy), compound butter, and roasted corn. Each component is delicious on its own, but together, they become something else entirely.

Slathered over blistered corn, the cowboy candy butter steals the show as the perfect side to ribs or blackened chicken. It’s also dangerously good spread on warm, torn baguette, especially with a cold glass of white wine nearby.

Make extra—you’ll want this butter within reach all summer long.

There was a time when summers would feel endless, as if the sun might never set and the clocks had simply given up. Hours unraveled slowly: scraped knees, frozen Ribena in saved water bottles—a thrifty sorbet—and entire afternoons spent tailing the retreating light with a ragtag confederacy of neighborhood pirates.

Only one summons could break the spell: the scent of smoke on the breeze. Dad would be at the grill, tongs in hand, apron slightly askew. Meanwhile, Mum would purposefully come and go, each time emerging from the house with a tray piled high with everything required to set the table for a supper that could always feed a few last-minute guests. Colorful plates, cutlery, mismatched glasses, flowers and lanterns, all jostled for a place alongside a small army of condiments: fiery pepper jam that caught at the back of your throat, a bowl of mayonnaise, tangy ketchup, and sweetcorn relish—glossy and golden.

On these balmy summer afternoons that invariably drifted into the evening, there was often Pimm’s for the grown‑ups, served in a huge jug with bobbing slices of cucumber, orange, and the odd drunken strawberry. For the rest of us: icy water, orange squash or lemonade, sharp and sugary enough to make our teeth ache.

But the best part came from the grill—ribs lacquered to a deep mahogany gloss, chicken edges blackened just enough to taste of fire, and corn, still wrapped in its husks, left to smoulder until the golden kernels split and blistered in the heat. We ate with sticky fingers and buttery chins, entirely convinced that the evening light stayed a little longer just to prolong the moment before our bedtime curfew.

We may be card‑carrying adults now, with inboxes that groan and an insistent pile of bills and responsibilities that can’t be ignored, but summer is just around the corner, and that still counts for something. Today’s recipe is therefore a quiet attempt to summon those warm honeyed childhood evenings.

The butter—sharp, sweet, and unreasonably good —is perhaps the best thing I’ve made in recent memory. The butter contains candied jalapeños which the Mennonites call Cowboy Candy. Candying anything may sound a little complicated and laborious but it’s not, so, if you’re sensible, you’ll make a generous jarful or two.

The candied jalapeños keep in the fridge for a week or two without complaint, though I doubt they will last that long. From there, you simply blend a few spoonfuls into softened butter—whatever kind you like—and shape into a rough cylinder. An hour in the fridge and it’s ready for whatever you fancy, though I can’t recommend it enough on corn roasted in its husk until the edges catch. A golden mess of sweet, salt, and heat.