Vanilla Bean Collective Order

Well with vanilla essence/extract being what it is in the shop, and the price of one bean alone being upwards of $5, a bunch of us decided to go in a collective order and order 1kg of Vanilla Beans from Vanilla Plantations Australia. Service was very fast, with post to where we are 2 days which is pretty good. It ended up being approx $11 for 85g of beans (19-22 pods depending on thickness/weight) which will more than make our vanilla essence, and we will have enough leftover to make heaps of vanilla sugar! The recipe came from this thread on EB and goes like this

Vanilla Essence

Put 1 to 6 vanilla pods into a tall narrow jar. Fill with vodka or half vodka, half commercial extract. Let steep at room temperature for at least one

month and shake before using. Replenish any extract you use with vodka or commercial extract. Will keep indefinitely..

You may want to cut down the amount used in recipes by half, as it tends to be stronger.

Will put up pics shortly of what arrived and of it divvied up - smelled DIVINE when it arrived here! I was really not wanting to use ziplock bags as I don't like them but when put against cost of fuel to meet up, not to mention that we couldn't all be in the same place at the same time (which is fair enough!) and would have had to package some anyway, well it worked out better to bag them and post them. I ran out of recycled envelopes of course, so used up the excess non-recycled ones we already had here.