Chocolate is so hard-to-miss, so easily combined with other flavours (chocolate and orange, chocolate and coffee, chocolate and peanut butter...) but there's something really just amazing about real vanilla. It's smooth. It's sort of sweet and sort of creamy and yet not either. Chocolate's fantasy. Vanila's a dream. I keep a big jar of granulated sugar with a couple of vanilla pods tucked into it. I love the smell whenever I take it down to bake with... and the pods last for ages, too.

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