4 days on and my Milk Liqueur still hasn't curdled.

I really can't express just how much thinking about this has taken over my life. It's keeping me up at night as I debate did I do something wrong? Should I scrap it and start again? Is it salvageable?

I have spent so much time Googling for other people who have followed the recipe and there seems to be a 50/50 split of people whose curdled and those who didn't. And those who didn't... it looks like it's 75/25 for it not working.

It may work when I strain it, but straining it is supposed to remove all the milk solids and leave me with a clear liquid and if there aren't any milk solids I'm not sure that can happen.

I have read the recipe over and over and I think that what I may have done wrong is add the vodka, sugar and then the milk rather than the vodka, milk and then the sugar. From reading other peoples' experiences it seems the milk should curdle when it mixes with the vodka, I'm not convinced about this, but either way I think that the sugar is making the mixture so syrupy that it won't curdle. So it was at 4am this morning I decided to try an experiment with what vodka and milk I had left.

So I mixed vodka and milk and guess what. No curdling. Then I add lemon and, well, no surprises here, I got lots of curdling.

So now I have uncurdled mix and curdled mix and unsure what to do I combine the two, hoping that the curdled mix will cause the rest to curdle. Guess what- it didn't. As soon as they're mixed I have even more uncurdled mix. Arrghh!

My next shot will be to curdle more milk and add lots of extra lemon to the mix and see if that sets it off. Fingers crossed it works.

Fortunately I do have other alcohol I played with earlier in the year to give as presents and so today I got to straining and bottling until I ended up with bottles of pear gin and pear vodka and lots of alcohol soaked pear. After much pondering, I've decided to freeze this and use it in future cocktail recipes. I'm not sure if it will freeze as the alcohol content will be so high but fingers crossed something goes right for me today.