Vanilla Essence

My friend Isabel and I chat about the things we are going to attempt to make pretty much everyday (we work together if I haven't mentioned this before).

One day she pointed me to a website that tells you how to make your own vanilla essence. Now I love vanilla, I honestly can't get enough of it, but it's so ridiculously expensive to buy! So I thought I may as well try this and if it works out, we will have a shed load of vanilla essence to last us ages!

This website gives really good advice on how to make your essence and what kind of beans to buy.

I bought some AAA* grade vanilla pods from Madagascar off Ebay, Ebay of all places!! Now the website says to only used B grade pods, but I thought I may as well try it with the A grade ones and see what happens. Worst comes to worst and I'll just have some vanilla flavoured vodka, woe is me...

The vodka is pretty much your standard kind that I bought from Waitrose, by all means use Absolut, Smirnoff or any other label you like, but  strongly doubt that value paint stripper kind from Sainsbury's and Tesco's will produce great essence!!

I then used 3 pods per cup of vodka. There are just under 3 cups per 70cl bottle of alcohol, so I used 9 pods. I cut the pod in half then scraped the seeds out and into the alcohol, and then I put the pods in.

It says to leave it for about 6 weeks in a dark place to mature and then shake every week, so I'm going to attempt to be patient and see what happens! I'll try and put up weekly blog posts about it so that you can see how successful or disastrous mine is!