What to use instead of vanilla
It depends entirely on what it's doing in the dish. Here's the job, what else does it, and what to skip.
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Background aroma in a baked custard, cake or cookie
Vanillin plus a few hundred trace compounds round off the sharp edges of egg and sugar, so the dish reads sweet and finished rather than eggy.
Vanilla bean pasteRan out
1 tsp paste per 1 tsp extract
Same strength with visible seeds and a slightly thicker, syrupy body. Adds a trace of sugar, which matters in a meringue.
Whole vanilla bean, split and scrapedRan out
1/2 bean per 1 tsp extract, steeped in the warm dairy for 20 min
Rounder and more floral because nothing was stripped out by alcohol. It needs a warm liquid to release, so it does nothing stirred into a cold batter.
Bourbon or dark rumRan out
1 tbsp per 1 tsp extract
Brings the same oaky vanillin note with a whisky edge behind it. The alcohol bakes off in a cake and stays audible in anything under 70C.
Vanilla sugarNo alcohol
1 tbsp vanilla sugar per 1 tsp extract, minus 1 tbsp of the recipe sugar
Milder and drier. Fine in a cookie or a pound cake, too faint for a custard where vanilla is the only flavour.
Almond extractRan out
1/4 tsp per 1 tsp vanilla extract
Takes over instead of sitting behind the dish, and pushes everything towards marzipan. Use it at a quarter strength or it dominates.
What doesn't work: Doubling a weak imitation extract to make up the difference. Synthetic vanillin is a single compound, so more of it gets louder without getting rounder, and past about 2 tsp per batch it turns bitter and faintly chemical.
Perfume in an uncooked cream, icing or cold drink
With no heat to drive off carrier alcohol and no other cooked flavours to hide behind, whatever goes in is exactly what you taste.
Vanilla bean pasteRan out
1 tsp per 1 tsp extract
Better here than in baking, because there is no alcohol note and the seeds read as a mark of quality in white cream.
Seeds scraped from a whole beanNo alcohol
1/2 bean per 1 tsp extract, whisked into the cream and rested 1 hour
Cleanest of the lot. It needs the rest to bloom, so a cream flavoured this way tastes thin the moment it is made and right an hour later.
Vanilla sugar in place of the recipe sugarNo alcohol
Match by weight against the sugar already in the recipe
Gentle and even. It only works if the recipe already carries sugar, and it cannot be pushed harder without sweetening the cream.
What doesn't work: Pouring in more extract to make a cold cream taste stronger. Above roughly 1 tsp per cup of cream the ethanol comes through as a solvent burn, and in whipped cream it also thins the fat and knocks the peaks down.