I love to make homemade gifts whenever I can. I think that when someone gives you something that they made with their own hands, it is telling you the the giver loves you and wants you to feel special. I recently made these little jars of vanilla sugar for a few people that I thought might need a treat. This would be a perfect gift for your child’s teacher or for the coffee and tea drinkers in your life. Vanilla sugar can be used in place of regular sugar when baking. It just adds even more fragrant vanilla flavor.
This project could not be any easier to make, it took me 10 minutes from start to finish. Vanilla beans can be expensive, they come from orchids and are very labor intensive. I like to buy mine in bulk from Amazon.com. These beans are very high quality and very reasonably priced. A good vanilla bean should smell like vanilla and be soft and pliable. To make a large quantity of vanilla sugar, just remember that the ratio of sugar to beans is 1:1. Sometimes, I like to add even more vanilla than that and use 2:1.
You need:
Mason jars with a tight fitting top
1 vanilla bean
1 cup of sugar
food processor
Use a knife or kitchen shears and cut the bean into small pieces.
Put the vanilla bean pieces into the food processor with the sugar. Let the machine run for about a minute or until you cannot see large chunks of vanilla bean.
Pour the sugar through a strainer to get the large chunks of bean out.
Put the vanilla sugar into the Mason jars.
To package as a gift, cut out two hearts from card stock. I cut mine freehand. Punch small holes in the hearts. Label a gift tag and thread some kitchen twine through the holes. Tie to secure.
Don’t you wish that you had some vanilla sugar for your coffee right about now?
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