Homemade Maple Syrup

I'm probably really late in discovering this phenomenon, but did you know that you can make your own homemade maple syrup at pennies on the dollar to the real stuff?
Of course it's not as "healthy" as real maple syrup, but it's a lot cheaper and it's a heck of a lot better for you than all the imitation syrups at the grocery store which are full of high fructose corn syrup and dyes.
Here comes the math...
For me, a jug of Target brand maple syrup costs $6.99. At 12 oz in the bottle, that ends up costing me 58 cents per ounce. Ouch!
The homemade stuff makes 2 cups (16 ounces) of syrup.
The sugar cost about $1.25 for four pounds (8 cups), and I only used 2 cups of that in the recipe, making the cost of the amount of sugar used in this recipe only 30 cents.
The water is incalculable, since I just used CowTown's finest, straight from the tap.
And the maple flavoring cost $1.99 for 1.5 oz. I only used half a teaspoon for the recipe. There are 9 teaspoons in one and a half ounces, so I only used about 11 cents' worth of flavoring.
Add it all up and the recipe cost only 41 cents to concoct, making each ounce of homemade syrup cost just over 2 cents.

The only drawback is that it's sugar! So, you have to watch your intake. I used a recipe calculator to determine that each tablespoon of the homemade syrup has about 50 calories. Drizzle lightly.
And enjoy!
Here's the recipe that came straight off the back of the maple flavoring box...

2 C sugar
1 C water
1/2 tsp maple flavoring

• Dissolve 2 cups of white (or brown) sugar in 1 cup of water and boil 1 minute.
• Cool syrup and add 1/2 teaspoon maple flavoring.
• For extra fine flavor add 1/4 teaspoon vanilla flavoring.

There are countless other recipes to be found on the internet. Literally, hundreds. So, feel free to search and experiment until you find your favorite combination of ingredients. And if you find (or invent) a really good one, post it here!