seriously i'm amazed (and somewhat appalled) that storebought mascarpone is soooo expensive when its technically not even cheese. we can make it easily at home at a fraction of the price using only TWO ingredients (whipping cream and lemon juice) so ever since i started making my own there's no turning back to storebought.

the reason why it took me so long was due to an unreliable recipe. ok maybe i shouldn't call it unreliable since there might just be some people who succeeded with the recipe and got their extract ready in 6 weeks, which i highly doubt so. i followed this recipe from the traveler's lunchbox and i did what was required - poured in a bottle of nielsen massey's vanilla extract (118ml) into one liter of vodka & added in 6 newly scraped vanilla bean seeds + pods and gave it a little shake every few days and it should be ready in about 6 weeks. but 6 weeks later the color was still extremely light and reeked very strongly of alcohol so i knew it wasn't ready yet. another 3 months passed (i did throw in somemore used ones along the way) and i was getting impatient.