Well, yesterday I did finally get round to it. You can find the recipe I followed (roughly) here on the silverspoon website, as I used silverspoon jam sugar that has added pectin in it for the jellying bit... I didn't really have a clue whether it was the right stuff to be using or not so thought it best to use their instructions, although theirs was just for raspberry... anyway. MINE was Raspberry and BLUEberry! I probably had about 500g altogether. :)
So FIRST you have to heat up the fruit "on a gentle heat" until they go a bit squishy and the juices start to run.
THEN you add allllllll the sugar. Like.. crazy amounts. The recipe I was following suggested a whole 1kg bag for 800g of fruit. I just wacked my whole 1kg bag in with my "roughly 500g".
(picture only shows HALF of the sugar... :S)
When all the sugar has dissolved, which actually happens quite quickly, it looks like this. Then I added a little knob of butter and a squidge of lemon juice (not in recipe, but I noticed it in others I had perused and thought why not?)
Then, you have to be stirring in continuously, and you turn the heat up and it starts bubbling like crazy and froths up like this, and you can't stir the bubbles down.
It's at this point that you start TIMING, and you boil it for FOUR minutes and keep stirring it allll the time. It will look something like this, and it spits a little bit so you might want to wear an oven glove while you're stirring it or something...
By the end of the four minutes, mine looked like this:
Then I couldn't really take pictures whilst I was faffing about trying to put it into jars. But I used a strainer and a funnel from my JAM kit to do one little jar without bits...
And then I had enough for two and a bit more jars of normal stuff (much easier to put in jars without the strainer!)
The whole jarring thing seemed a bit scary but what I figured out from my jar instructions (lol) is that you have to WASH the new jars, and sterilize them before putting the jam in them, and you do that by putting them in boiling water. Which it's them preeeettty difficult to remove them from without some sort of "tongs"... just a thought. I wasn't too sure about the vaccuums and stuff, but from what I gather, them should be find without having been specially canned or processed or anything, as long as they're kept refridgerated and used within a month.
It tastes really good anyway and so I am very pleased! And it seems to have set ok, maybe a little on the runny side still but very much jam-like. It might be a touch on the sweet side but I like sweet things so can't really comment. I'm guessing it might be too much for some but hey... :)
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