Homemade Vanilla

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas! I wanted to share with you what I did for Christmas gifts this year. I made homemade vanilla! I had so much fun making it. Did you know it only takes 2 ingredients to make vanilla? Yes, it’s THAT easy. Vanilla and Vodka are the only 2 ingredients. Let me show you what I did…

I ordered a bunch of vanilla beans from Beanilla. I highly recommend ordering your beans online. I tried buying some at Whole foods and they were $6 a bean! I got them for $1.50 a bean by ordering them online and you get to choose what type a vanilla you want, I used Madagascar vanilla beans. 

I cut the beans in half so they would fit in the bottle. You will then slice the bean starting from the top and go down to the bottom until you can see the “meat” of the bean. This exposes the beans to make the vanilla.

I bought these bottles from The Container Store. And found the stickers here.

I used cheap vodka because everywhere I read it said it didn’t matter about the quality. Use a funnel to fill all the bottles with vodka leaving just enough room at the top so that it will not overflow when you put your beans inside.

Place your beans inside your bottles.

These jars need to mature for 6 weeks so I put a sticker on the bottom to let everyone know when they can use them.

After a week of maturing

It’s best to keep them in a dark place while they are maturing. I think it was a big hit!

Check back later to see some pictures from my Christmas weekend. It was a good one as always!