Homemade Madagascar Vanilla

I love to bake!  Jerry and I decided to try our hand at making Vanilla.  Being that my cowboy is so smart and thinks the only way to go is the quality way...he researched the beans, the vodka and the different final products.  We chose to buy the beans from olivenation.com.  We received lovely long, plump and fragrant beans.  He bought Smirnoff Vodka.  The bottles were ordered from specialtybottle.com.  They come with caps and we ordered little shrink wraps to go around the caps. The labels came from onlinelabels.com. They have a very easy and free template you can use and save when designing your labels.

March 2011 - The plump beans, split and ready to be scraped

Scraping the beans and putting them in the 2 qt jar

Seeds...Paste...Caviar

Beans and Caviar in Vodka...going into a dark cabinet to age.

Look how dark it is after just a couple months

September 2011...It has aged 6 months.  We've strained it and are mixing the 2 jars together before bottling. We probably went a little overboard this being the first time we've made it.  If a little's good, more is better :)  We increased the amount of beans we used...ending up with a 4x Vanilla.  Mercy is it good.

Cutest little 2 ounce bottles waiting for liquid heaven

TaDa!!!  Bottled, labeled and ready for gift giving :)

We ended up with 55/2 ounce bottles.  We're gonna go ahead and pour more vodka over remaining beans...just to see if it's worth it to use the beans 1 more time as so many online say to do.