Homemade vanilla extract

Here is the link to Suzanne McMinn's vanilla recipe. It is a good one. I do not use the dark rum in mine because I'm cheap. I get my beans from eBay and they're cheap and high quality. Enjoy!


This is a bottle I started on October 1st and will be giving away for Christmas.

I have no ingredients bread

Sundays and or Mondays, depending on my work schedule that week or when we run out of bread, are my baking days. I make the week's bread and I usually bake half of it, and put half of it in the fridge to bake later on in the week. I also try to make something sweet to stick in husband's lunch for the week. Husband is 5'11". I'm barely scratching 5'4". We weigh the same thing. Drives me nuts. So obviously the man needs calories. Today I was going through all of my recipes on pinterest seeing what I could bake with the ingredients I had. And pretty much came up with... nothing. I coulda made chocolate chip cookies, but those are so boring. So I decided to see what I could experiment with. I started by referencing my handy dandy banana bread recipe. I graduated from college on a Sunday and got married the next Saturday. On the way to my camping trip honeymoon, my godparents gave me this card. There was money in it! :)

We didn't have any internet connection back then at our old duplex and I guess I hadn't any other paper, so on our way home from our honeymoon we stopped at a friend's house and I googled this banana bread recipe and wrote it on the card. There's also an unknown phone number written in the margin. I have no idea what site this recipe came from, but it is a damn fine recipe for bread.

I started with 1 cup of AP flour.

And added a half cup of cocoa powder. I wanted it really chocolaty. Did you know that cocoa powder acts like flour? That's why I used only 1 cup of flour and a half cup of cocoa instead of the full 1 1/2 cups of flour in the recipe.

A cup of sugar and a tsp of soda. By the by, this is totally not the way I normally bake. I always start out by creaming my butter and sugar unless the recipe otherwise specifies. Here I mixed the dry ingredients and the sugar, which is technically a wet ingredient. Not sure what I was thinking.

Since I'm out of WW flour (did you notice that I was using only white? So not me.) I added a palmful of flax seed meal for some fiber.

1/3 cup butter.

An egg.

1 tbsp of my amazing homemade vanilla. It's awesome. Vodka and vanilla beans. It's been steeping for months. I'm making 2 large bottles for Christmas gifts.

And 1/2 of a bag of cinnamon chips. These are seriously addicting. I ate the first half of the bag.

The dough was very dry and not really coming together. Banana's are very wet, and I used the same amount of flour as the banana bread recipe. It needed moisture. I added a splash of milk.

I spooned it into the well greased bread pan and used the back of the spoon to smooth it into the corners. Lick finger, lick spoon, lick bowl. In that order. Lather, rinse, repeat. Bake at 350 for 60 minutes or until it's done.

I checked on it at 30 minutes and it was nice and high. You can see that it did fall sometime between then and when I pulled it out of the oven. I'm really not sure why, I haven't had this happen very often, so I can't really make any recommendations to keep it from happening next time. Albus the cat would like a slice. Please?!