Nothing Plain About Vanilla When You Make Your Own

Homemade vanilla extract is better than anything you can buy. It looks beautiful in its jar. You have liquor for essence, and seeds from the pods when you want a little black sparkle, and then the pods themselves to perfume your sugar. You will reach for it more often and your desserts will all be the finer for it- as a single note it is exotic and rich- nothing plain about it. With fruits, it brings out the floral perfume of their birth (it is itself a flower- the seed pod of an orchid).

This cherry tart is brightened with rich 
specks of vanilla.

More romance still- it marries the other flavors, buffing their rougher edges, and giving them a strong (discrete) velvety background to play on, especially chocolate:

How to make it? Just find a source of good fresh vanilla beans- a wholesale spice purveyor, not the ones sold in pairs in a glass tube- too expensive, and you can't smell them. At the store, when they open the container, it should knock you out. Heads should turn. Buy as many as you can afford, at least ten, more if you can- they won't spoil.

Now get a bottle of hard liquor- something respectable you would drink on its own, but not necessarily top shelf. I used whiskey here, but rum is also tasty. You could do vodka but I like to start out with something already golden. Put  the vanilla beans upright into a tall narrow jar, and fill it to the top with liquor. It will need a couple of  weeks to develop. use the liquid as you would any commercial vanilla extract. When you can see it- with fruits, with anything white (ice cream, panna cotta, cake frostings, pavlovas)- snip off the tip of a fat liquor soaked pod and drizzle in some syrupy paste filled with exotic-looking black specks.

Keep the pod in the liquor. Every now and then top up the liquor or add some fresh vanilla beans, or both.

It is an investment at the outset, but ultimately much more economical. 

Don't think of it as an ingredient so much as a lasting upgrade in the way you cook. The subtle perfume will delight everything it touches.