Vanilla Sugar

One of the side effects of Daring Bakers is Real Vanilla to play with. So I did what any enterprising young baker would do and made Vanilla Sugar.

Let me first of talk of the Vanilla bean itself. It was leathery and oily and didn't smell as sweet / fresh / vanillaish / whatever as I had expected. But I am use to that, I learned the hard way not to taste my ingredients (this is a lesson i keep having to relearn) or judge the finished product by the raw taste.

So I followed directions and seeded the things. They were still oily and I think I ended up with almost as much on me as in the bowl. It was as bad as trying to get cling film to stop sticking to the wrong thing. I kept scraping it off one thing and trying to scrape it where I wanted it and it never quite worked right. I am sure with practice this procedure will get easier (meaning less messy) As a Bonus I smelled nummy!

The vanilla bean added pretty specks to everything and made some very nice whipped cream. I don't think however that the Danish Braid was really the best platform to showcase the vanilla bean. Which brings me to the Vanilla sugar.

The vanilla sugar certainly smells more like what I expected than the bean. But seeing the bean remnants poking up thru the pristine sugar is a little odd. And as much as I would like to tell you that the Kool-Aid I made with my vanilla sugar was raised to a whole new level of Kool-aidness, it was still just Kool Aid. It is possible I need more vanilla in my sugar and eventually as I use more vanilla beans there will be more vanilla in my sugar.