Make Your Own Vanilla Extract

Merry Christmas!  I hope you all had a wonderful holiday. As I've written before, every year we give a little Christmas Eve party and I give out some kind of homemade goodie at the end of the evening.  This year I wanted to do the fun DIY thing of making your own vanilla extract.  I go through so much vanilla extract and the good stuff is so expensive.  I love the idea of making your own from good vanilla beans and then just adding vodka to it to keep it going - after all, that's all vanilla extract is, really - alcohol and vanilla beans.   All you do is pour unflavored vodka into a glass jar, cut a couple of vanilla beans in half and then split them and stick them into the bottle.  You need to let this steep for a couple of months until it is ready to use.  I started all these bottles in October, to give out at Christmas. So everyone got a bottle of vanilla extract and a little bag of caramels topped with Sicilian Sea Salt, which I made.

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Cranberry Upside Down Cake for the Holidays

Well, the holidays are fast approaching - do you have your menus figured out yet? I have two boys coming home from college in the next week, both of whom have birthdays, and we give a big Christmas Eve party every year. It's a lot of food planning.  I've had cookbook reviews to do, I've been writing Christmas cards, baking a lot and buying and wrapping gifts.  But I did manage to finish this purple scarf I've been knitting for quite some time.  It's made out of Malabrigo (indigo 88) and it's super soft and very fun to wear.   Just had to show that in case we have any knitters out there.

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