Functions in controllers and blade - Laravel

I'm slowly starting to come to grip with Laravel but keep having little issues doing basic things.

So this is what I have at the moment

A function and a function that is called by my route both in my webcontroller.php

// Function for printing out copyright year
function copyright_info($begin_year = NULL)
{
    date_default_timezone_set('Europe/London');
    if(empty($begin_year) || $begin_year == date('Y'))
        echo date('Y');
    else
        echo $begin_year." - ".date('Y');    
}

// function being called by route.php to get Restaurant Page
public function restaurant () {
    $cookie = Cookie::get("basket");
    return view('pages.restaurant', ['basket' => $cookie]);
}

Now all the first function does is print out something like 2013-2015 once the year is provided.

So I should be able to do something like this

public function restaurant () {

    // use the function and get copyright year
    $year = copyright_info('2013')

    $cookie = Cookie::get("basket");
    // pass data to the view including the year we just created
    return view('pages.restaurant', ['basket' => $cookie, 'year' => $year]);
}

Now in my restaurant.blade.php file, I'm including my footer in my includes folder that is generic to all my pages like this @include('includes.footer'). Now the footer is what actually contains a div that requires the $year I have passed to the restaurant view. in my footer.blade.php I have this

<p style="font-size: 0.9rem">Copyright &copy; {{ $year }}  &#124;  xxx.com Limited</p>

Now I would assume that when I pass data to restaurant and footer is included in restaurant the data will apply to footer when it gets included in restaurant but that doesn't happpen.

Any guidance appreciated

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