What you need
Lynn starts with one cup of water and one cup of white sugar. The recipe calls for two cups of sugar to one cup of water, and she says you can use two cups of white, or two cups of brown, but she goes with one cup of each because the brown sugar gives it a molasses sort of taste. The brown sugar she reaches for is her own homemade brown sugar, spooned into the cup rather than packed down.
The pot matters more than you would think. She uses a tall, thick bottom pot so it will not scorch and will not boil over, and explains that boiling sugar and water together foams up, so a pot that is too little leaves a sugar mess all over the stove. She cooks the whole thing on a low medium, not real hot and not too low.
How Lynn makes it
Water and both sugars go in together, and then it is a waiting game. She gives it a mix and says it takes a little while to get hot and start boiling, stirring the lumps of brown sugar until they dissolve.
As soon as it starts to boil, she adds two tablespoons of butter, real butter. Her reason for adding it early is practical: if you let the butter cook down in the syrup instead of stirring it in at the end, you will not get that little film of butter on top when you open the jar. Then she adds a dash, a pinch of salt, whatever you can pinch in your fingers.
What she is after next is a boil that does not quit. She shows it going foamy and staying at a boil even while she stirs it, and that is when she sets a timer for four minutes and keeps stirring so it does not scorch.
Flavoring and cooling
When the four minutes are up she moves the pot off the heat and adds the flavoring. In goes about half a teaspoon of vanilla extract, followed by about a teaspoon of maple extract for that maple syrup taste. She mentions she has used butter flavoring in it before, so the extract is a matter of what you like.
It already looks like syrup at this point, and she notes it has thickened a little and will get thicker as it cools down. She lets it cool for around an hour before it goes into the jar. If the jar is cold, she warms it in the microwave for about thirty seconds first, and says you can run it under hot water for a few minutes instead if you would rather. After a spell in the fridge she pours it over a waffle and shows how much it thickened once it chilled.
Storing it and using it
For a container, she uses a mason jar, and suggests recycling the store syrup bottle you just finished, or one of the little glass bottles with a spout on the end if you have them. She keeps hers in the fridge, and says that is what she would recommend because of the two tablespoons of butter in it. In the same breath she says yes, it can be canned, and that she might make a video on it, but she does not go through a canning process in this one.
If you are watching your sugar, she says a sugar substitute will work as long as you keep the same amounts, two cups of substitute to one cup of water. One last thing she points out at the end: once the syrup chills you can still see a little trace of the butter that tried to form back, and it dissolves right into the syrup on hot waffles. The full method is on the video page, and questions can go to Ask Lynn.