Think of this post as an ad break between the epic movie that is ‘El Celler de Can Roca’…

I’ll be honest, i’m struggling with motivation a little bit at the mo – blog-wise and life-wise, and now that Christmas is turning up pretty quickly, I’m realising I need to catch up with that too! I made Vanilla Extract last Christmas for friends and family, and I’ve had a request for more this year. This is fine, as it’s a really quick and easy thing to make – but it does need about two months to mature, so I really should’ve made it a month ago. It will be ok though, i’ll just give it to people with a little ‘Best after’ note so they know when to start using it!

Vanilla extract is made with only two things: Vanilla beans/pods, and alcohol. Commercial Vanilla extract can have sugar syrup in it too, but if it’s just used for baking there’s no need. Vanilla beans can be expensive in the supermarket, and you’ll need quite a few for this recipe (depending on how much you want to make), so I tend to buy them in bulk on Amazon or Ebay – this year I bought a pack of 10 ‘extract grade’ beans from here – they were £2.30 and they were perfectly good – not dry, and smelt amazing.

You don’t need to buy expensive alcohol either, I usually buy standard vodka as it has the least flavour, but I know people also use rum or bourbon which would be nice in baking too.

Anyway onto the super-easy recipe…

Homemade Vanilla Extract

70cl Bottle of alcohol of your choice (my vodka was 37.5%)

10 Vanilla Beans

attractive bottles/jars to gift them in

1. Cut your vanilla beans in half length-wise with kitchen scissors or a knife – if you’re going to leave them in the jars/bottles to continue maturing, leave them connected at one end (it looks prettier!).

2. Put them in your bottle of alcohol.

3. Leave for as long as possible!

If you have your gifting bottles/jars ready, you can make the extract straight into these – just divide up the amount of beans/alcohol, and make sure you sterilise the jars before using. I haven’t got round to buying nice bottles yet (told you I was disorganised this year!), so will be leaving mine in the vodka bottle until the last minute, and then decanting and fishing out the pods so they can continue to mature in their new bottles.

Here’s a photo of the extract I made last year (excuse the phone quality)

Even if you don’t want to give this as presents to people, it’s really nice to know you have an endless supply of vanilla extract to hand 🙂

P.s Vodka is an excellent base to make Christmassy liqueurs with too, and they only take 2 weeks – so i may be making limoncello or similar soon – watch this space…

P.P.S. Happy thanksgiving to any American readers!