hi i'm heather birdnetty for ehow.com i want to make some peanut brittle the reason why i love peanut brittle so much is if you're in a pinch and you need a great hostess gift peanut brittle is it it keeps for days and it's super easy to make so let's get to it i have four cups of granulated sugar now notice i'm going to use a tall pot here on my stove only because you'll see at the end it'll bubble up so you want to make sure that you have enough leeway so it doesn't bubble over onto your stove and make a disgusting mess i'm going to turn my heat on high two cups of corn syrup get that all in there you can hear it start to bubble now with a rubber spatula gonna get very hot we're gonna just make sure this is all mixed together basically we're just cooking the corn syrup and the sugar together so to my peanut brittle i like to add a vanilla bean i just like the flavor it gives plus it has a nice little speckled look to it i'm going to split it lengthwise pull them apart take the back of my knife i'm going to scrape all the seeds out just like so we're going to add that into our pot so now we're going to let this cook until light caramel so in terms of caramels when i say that i'm making a light caramel what i really mean is that we're cooking the sugar to the point where it's almost burnt and it's gonna have a light amber hue okay it's basically burnt sugar is what a caramel is so now that i've reached a light caramel stage i'm gonna add my peanuts these are just blanched raw peanuts give these a stir i'm just going to cook it one step further just to get a little deeper color perfect color okay now at this point i'm going to add my butter just a little bit now watch out this is going to bubble up because it's so hot just stand back great i'm going to add my baking soda stir that in see how it almost looks like foam and a little drop of vanilla extract as we continuously stir i'm going to remove this from the heat and pour it on our greased baking sheet and just let it subside now watch out it's gonna bubble up but it will subside it's extremely hot so don't touch the sides of the pan with your hands and let it sit down at room temperature until it sets i'm heather bertnetti catch me next time on ehow.com