Vanilla Butter

100g softened unsalted butter

1 vanilla pod, seeds scraped out.

1. Mix the seeds through the butter, using a spatula, until seeds are throughly and evenly dispersed.
2. Wrap the vanilla butter in greaseproof paper and refrigerate until needed.

In the name of thinking outside the box, what to do with a leftover vanilla pod? This one will get used for flavoring the custard for my bread and butter pudding, but if you weren’t using it for that, you could do the following:

1. Add it to your caster sugar to make vanilla sugar
2. Keep it wrapped in cling film in the fridge, use it when needed to make some tea. Try vanilla and mint. Or vanilla, ginger, honey and lemon. If you have camomile tea bags, add some vanilla pod to make camomile and vanilla tea.
3. Blitz it in a hand held blender and stir through a pot of natural or greek yogurt and leave to infuse overnight. Pass through a sieve the following day to remove the blitzed up pod, for a delicious vanilla yogurt.