Weekend Cooking: Jelly, Jam and Juice Oh My

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This has been an incredibly good berry year here. Our currant bushes and gooseberry bushes as well as our elderflower tree have given us loads of berries and blossoms so I decided to make jelly, jam and juices (and one or two pies or cobblers)

Elderflower Cordial is incredibly easy to make. All you need is:

40 clusters of elderflowers

  3 lemons

50 g citric acid

2 litres of water

2 kg sugar

2 ml sodium benzoate

Putt the flowers in a large bucket or pot (one you don’t need for 5 days).

Wash lemons in warm water and then slice them finely add them to the flowers.

Add citric acid to flowers and lemons.

Boil water and sugar until sugar has melted.

Pour sugar and water mixture over flowers and and lemons.

Let stand for 5 days in a cool place.

After 5 days allow juice to filter so you separate the liquid from the other ingredients.

Mix the sodium benzoate with a little bit of the juice, then add it to the rest of the juice.

Pour into well cleaned bottles.

The juice freezes really well. If you don’t freeze it you need to use it fairly quickly.

So apart from drinking the elderflower cordial what can you do with it? Well I found two different recipes in Delia’s Summer Cookbook which I reviewed a few weeks ago. The first one was English Gooseberry Cobbler. It was really good, but needed more sugar. The cobbler topping was perfect though. Light, fluffy and just right. The second one was:

Gooseberry and Elderflower Preserve

A few comments on this recipe. I tried the butter at the bottom of the pan and it didn’t work. It still burned. I was able to salvage the preserve but next time I will skip that step and just make sure I stir often.

I tried the jam on waffles (in Sweden we eat waffles with jam/preserve and whipped cream or ice cream). And it was really yummy. Quite tart so it needs the sweeter ice cream or whipped cream.

Copyright ©2010 Zee from Notes from the North. This post was originally posted by Zee from Notes from the North. It should not be reproduced without express written permission.