Continuing my production of house made (homemade) gifts for friends and family this week I made vanilla sugar. This one is incredibly easy and allows time to do other things, like the 3o pounds of bacon I’m also making.
Vanilla sugar is a combination of split vanilla beans and white sugar: that’s it. Get whole vanilla beans, split them in half and add them to white sugar. Give it time to draw the flavour and the beans out and you have a lovely scented and flavoured sugar to add to items that will benefit from the combination. I don’t recommend it for baking since you’ll lose the essence of it.
I find it easier to cut the vanilla beans in half lengthwise and then widthwise so they fit nicely in my gift bags or 250ml canning jars. You can also scrape out the seeds and add them to the sugar to speed up the process. If doing that keep everyone in one container and give it a good shake or stir every day to keep the seeds distributed. You’ll know the vanilla beans are giving their love to the sugar when you see the sugar becomes moist. I used a large freezer bag as seen above.
I keep a large 1L jar in the cupboard and add vanilla beans to it after I’ve scraped out the seeds, mostly for ice cream. Remove the dried ones and keep adding sugar for an unending supply.
