The other day I was having a lie down at work because I was feeling a bit poorly. All of a sudden, Bob arrived…

Bob is ever so sweet.  He works two doors down with Jason at Edge Design Workshop.  Edge are an architecture firm and very good too!

I have fallen in love with the iPhone app Instagram.  Basically you take photos and apply retro effects to them (with some really fun results) and then share them in a photo stream which people all around the world can see.  There are some brilliant photographers out there.  It is amazing what the revolution of smart phones can do to creativity.  Suddenly you don’t need loads of expensive kit to be creative!

This morning I got the sugar and placed it in a large roasting dish. I put it in the oven on 170 for 10 minutes.  Whilst I did this, I returned the preserving pan to a gentle heat.

After 10 minutes and when the liquid is warm, add the sugar to it. Do not let it boil whilst you are dissolving the sugar, just stir it on a gentle heat until you no longer have granules on the back of your spoon.

When the sugar is dissolved, bring the marmalade to the boil until it is bubbling gently and leave for 3 hours.  After 2.5 hours, put a small plate in the fridge and leave for half an hour.  Remove the plate from the fridge and, using a spoon, put a small dollop of marmalade onto the plate. Cool in the fridge for one minute and then press it with your little finger to see if it goes wrinkly. If it does, it is ready to set. If it does not, then you need to heat the marmalade a while longer.

When it becomes wrinkly, it is ready to put into jars with a jam funnel.

Annnnddd……

TADAAAAAAA!!  I now need to leave my 7 jars for the night to cool and then I will post photos of them all labelled up tomorrow!

I am not sure quite why I chose to make marmalade…. I don’t even like it!  But somehow it looked like fun.  I searched for a recipe and, instead of breaking myself gently into the world of making preserves and choose the one hour recipe, I decided to go for a Delia recipe that takes two days!  Still, I have to confess that I am really enjoying it! I am particularly looking forward to making little fabric toppers for the jars…!

I thought I’d share the process with you…

Ingredients:

1.35KG (3lb) Seville Oranges
2 Lemons
2.7KG (6lb)  Granulated Sugar – that is a lot of sugar!!

DAY 1:

Gently scrub the fruit and place it whole into a preserving pan with 5 pints (3 litres) of water and bring it to a simmer. Cover with thick foil and leave for 3 hours so that the moisture is not escaping, but the fruit is poaching gently.

After three hours, spoon the fruit into a colander and then cut the oranges in half, scraping all the contents (including pith and seeds) into a medium sized pan.  Keep the peel.  Do the same with the lemons but discard the peel.

Add 1 litre of the poaching juice to the pan and simmer for 10 minutes.  Line a sieve with muslin and place it over a bowl.  Pour the pan contents into the sieve and leave to cool and drip through.

Whilst it is all cooling, chop the orange peel into quarters and then thick strips according to how you like your marmalade. Put this back in the preserving pan.

When the muslin contents are cool, pick up the four corners of the muslin and squeeze out all of the juice as hard as you can.

Once you have got all of the juice that you can, discard the innards of the muslin.  Tip the sticky juice into the preserving pan.  Cover with a tea towel and leave overnight.

Frosticles

Night time snow in the Suffolks

I took this picture of Monty whilst he was shaking his head – the result is quite amusing!

Christmas day

Grandma

Mama y Papa

Tim

Boxing day – JT makes modelling balloons!

Twinkle

MOnty

Tree

New Year’s Eve… Claire, Andrew and George

George & Al

JT can be relied upon for a serious photo

An angel in a wine glass

Chinese lanterns… my new favourite pastime!

Ready for lift off!

Happy new year!