FLAVORED EXTRACTS AND SYRUP

 Another favorite kitchen tool of mine is flavored extracts and syrups.  They are a great way to make a common recipe more versatile as well as adding an extra dimension to a recipe.  Flavored extracts are easily found, grocery stores carry the more common flavors.  While more exotic flavors can be found in specialty baking stores as well as online.  I have eight that I use often, some more frequently than others.

 Around Christmas time I make a variety of Christmas goodies to pass along to friends and family.  One of the things I like to make is a raspberry chocolate truffle.  At first I used raspberry chocolate chips and melted them down, but they are getting increasingly harder to find.  So I've adapted and now I use some raspberry extract.

 A nice thing about using extracts in baking is that you control how weak or strong you want the added flavor to be.  For the raspberry extract I use it in my raspberry chocolate truffles and my raspberry chocolate fudge with chunks of Oreo in it.


 I use orange extract to make orange dark chocolate fudge. 

 I also use it to make orange rolls (looks like a cinnamon roll, just with orange instead of cinnamon and an orange sugar glaze over the top).




 When I make my Aunt Dora's Tea Cookies, I use lemon extract.  It's basically a sugar cookie dough and I use it with cookie cutters and frost them when done.

 Another use I have for the lemon extract is for making white chocolate blueberry lemon fudge.



I use the strawberry flavoring to make strawberry fudge.

 A basic extract staple is vanilla.

 Vanilla extract is like the work horse of extracts.  I use it in cookies, breads, fudge, truffles and so on.  If you only have one extract, vanilla is the one to have.



 I have cherry extract that I use around Valentine's Day to make chocolate cherry fudge (I also cut up chunks of cherries and put them in), which I then cut into heart shapes ♥

  My last extract I use is peppermint.

 I use it when making both my white chocolate peppermint cheesecake and white chocolate peppermint fudge.  I also crush some round peppermint candies and put that in the fudge and use it as a garnish for the cheesecake.


 Lastly, I have coconut syrup that I initially used when I made chocolate smoothies.

 Then one day while I was making chocolate chip cookies I wondered what it would taste like if I used some coconut syrup in it.  They turned out SUPERB!!!  If you like coconut, you should give it a try sometime, I used about 1 1/2 tsp.


 There are endless other flavors of extracts and syrups out there.  Use your imagination and creativity and see what you can come up with!  My next addition will be a green apple extract, I already have a couple recipe ideas for it and am very excited to try them out!