I’m all for trying new things, and so, when my daughter gave me a bottle of vanilla extract that she had made, I figured I’d check into the recipe.
I’m not cheap: I’m curious. I keep telling myself that, so hush.
I’m suspicious of the recipe blogs which promise, “It’s effortless,” but they were right this time. It was easy!
I had to locate some vanilla beans (probably the hardest part of the project) and then put a few vanilla beans in a bottle and cover the beans with cheap vodka. Let sit for a few months, and you have the best smelling vanilla extract around.
But this isn’t a recipe blog. You can Google the recipe if you want.
I made a batch a few months ago and pulled out the first bottle to use on my famous chocolate chip cookie recipe. You know, my everybody-snitches-the-dough chocolate chip cookie recipe. Google the recipe.
I mixed up the ingredients, and the snitchers wandered by. Each one took a sample and said, “Weird. This has an odd aftertaste.”
So I tasted, too. And it did. Blech.
I had already put the first batch in the oven, and I’m averse to throwing away a batch of cookie dough. I mean, it has butter and eggs in there. That’s like liquid gold. So I waited out the baking process.
When the cookies came out of the oven, and I tasted one, they were fine. No aftertaste. Pretty much like normal.
What in the world? Where had the aftertaste gone? Curious minds like mine need to know.
Some who have a scientific mind would formulate experiments. They’d try the recipe in different ways until they uncovered the cause. They’d waste a lot of time, in other words.
Not me. It was faster to do some thinking. What was different? New?
Aha, the new batch of vanilla.
I unscrewed the lid and took a sniff.
This was not a lovely vanilla scent. This smelled of pure alcohol. I had not added the vanilla beans four months ago.
No vanilla beans giving up their sweet aroma. No vanilla beans adding flavor to the cookies.
The odd aftertaste was the vodka, which burned off when I baked the cookies.
My daughter, one of the snitchers, put it best: “You served us vodka cookies?”
Well, only to the snitchers, I guess. Glad my grandsons weren’t around that day.
