I Made This: Christmas Cards 2012

Three very different collections of Christmas Cards this year. Crafted up a storm!

I Made This: Vanilla Extract

Every year I try to do a DIY Christmas Gift for friends and family. It's a good excuse to do a craft and I *hope* they find the unique gifts interesting and thoughtful. This year, I've been crazy busy so needed something that wouldn't be too involved. Luckily, I already had the idea to make Vanilla Extract, so come October I took an hour to do all the prep work.

I ordered some vanilla beans from Amazon and stopped by the liquor store to pick up some booze. All the instructions I found had varying concentrations of how many vanilla beans to parts liquid so I read a bunch and came up with the range 3-8 beans per Cup. Since the amount of time to let the mixture sit also differed wildly (2 months to a year) and it was already October, I decided to err on the stronger side. I also read varying accounts of using vodka and rum, so I decided to do a batch of each. I picked up one 750ml of rum and one 750ml of Absolut vodka and returned home for the next steps.

Again, there was a lot of variety in terms of next steps, but since I knew I only had 2 months, I decided to take the extra time to ensure stronger flavor.

• Empty booze into pot.
• Sliced open the vanilla pods lengthwise, scraped out the seeds, and added it to my empty booze bottles. 
• Warmed up booze in pot on the stove.
• Added warmed up booze back into bottles.
• Recapped and gave it a hearty shake, then put in closet where I shook daily for the next couple of weeks.

Finally, the time came to prepare my gifts for giving. I ordered mini bottles and Avery round labels off of Amazon (my fave). I strained the liquid through a coffee filter and strainer to remove the seed debris, then funneled my liquid into the bottles. For an extra step of fancy, I cut some of the remaining pods into small pieces and placed those in the bottle too. I thought it would look cool, but in reality, you can't see them since the bottles were so dark, so hopefully it will just make the vanilla that much stronger.

You may recall that I used both Vodka & Rum. They were definitely different, but I honestly didn't think one was "better" than the other, probably just a matter of preference. I was hoping to keep a bottle each for myself so I could bake with them as the final test, but I didn't mark the bottles and wound up losing track of which was which. Oh well.

Back to the labels, thanks to Avery's software, it was pretty easy to design and set up the printer to make super cute labels, so I slapped those on and finished it off with a little bow of baker's twine. Overall, I was incredibly happy with the way these turned out!