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igenlodeI made the elderflower cordial with blood oranges, since that happens to be the (expensive) speciality of the season which the greengrocer has been selling me, and as a result it came out the most astonishing pink colour after the slices of orange had been steeping with the elderflowers for 36 hours :-)
In fact it bears a strong visual resemblance to the rose and elderflower cordial, albeit without the hint of rose flavour. It isn't nearly as sweet as one would expect from something with 2lb of sugar in it, possibly because I actually remembered to put the citric acid in for once (left over in this case from the cheese-making kit) -- leaving it out simply reduces the keeping qualities of the cordial, so far as I have been able to tell, but it has to be kept in the fridge anyway. And of course when diluted to drinking proportions it's not detectably sweet at all, at least if you drink your squash as diluted as I do (about 1:10 or rather less if concentrated)...
I discovered on getting home with my bag of elderflowers that I had actually managed to pick forty heads instead of thirty, so considered attempting the rose and elderflower cordial as well in order not to waste the excess (apart from any other considerations, there physically isn't *room* even in my big earthenware mixing bowl to fit any more ingredients), but decided, given the problems I've had in sourcing scented roses in the past, to go for an elderflower jam recipe. So far as I can tell this is literally just sugar and scented water set with pectin, with zero fruit content!
I couldn't find any pectin in the supermarket and thus had to buy the expensive jam sugar (probably the point), which is more than twice the cost of ordinary granulated, so I didn't want to buy two whole 1kg bags just in order to get the specified 1.3kg of sugar. Instead I boiled up the pips from the lemon slices that I was infusing in the cordial; sadly the blood oranges were seedless. I hope the resulting eggcupful of yellowish liquid will work as a pectin supplement -- this is one delicate jam that you really can't just boil indefinitely until reduced enough to set :-O
I also need to make some sweet orange marmalade to use up the steeped citrus slices, which proved a very successful tactic last year...
In fact it bears a strong visual resemblance to the rose and elderflower cordial, albeit without the hint of rose flavour. It isn't nearly as sweet as one would expect from something with 2lb of sugar in it, possibly because I actually remembered to put the citric acid in for once (left over in this case from the cheese-making kit) -- leaving it out simply reduces the keeping qualities of the cordial, so far as I have been able to tell, but it has to be kept in the fridge anyway. And of course when diluted to drinking proportions it's not detectably sweet at all, at least if you drink your squash as diluted as I do (about 1:10 or rather less if concentrated)...
I discovered on getting home with my bag of elderflowers that I had actually managed to pick forty heads instead of thirty, so considered attempting the rose and elderflower cordial as well in order not to waste the excess (apart from any other considerations, there physically isn't *room* even in my big earthenware mixing bowl to fit any more ingredients), but decided, given the problems I've had in sourcing scented roses in the past, to go for an elderflower jam recipe. So far as I can tell this is literally just sugar and scented water set with pectin, with zero fruit content!
I couldn't find any pectin in the supermarket and thus had to buy the expensive jam sugar (probably the point), which is more than twice the cost of ordinary granulated, so I didn't want to buy two whole 1kg bags just in order to get the specified 1.3kg of sugar. Instead I boiled up the pips from the lemon slices that I was infusing in the cordial; sadly the blood oranges were seedless. I hope the resulting eggcupful of yellowish liquid will work as a pectin supplement -- this is one delicate jam that you really can't just boil indefinitely until reduced enough to set :-O
I also need to make some sweet orange marmalade to use up the steeped citrus slices, which proved a very successful tactic last year...