Elderflower Champagne Receipe ( low alcohol content)

In truth this is just a fizzy drink! I consider the Elderflower to be one of the most useful plants known to man. You can use the flowers to make drinks and cosmetics or fritters, the berries make a passable wine, cordial and can be used for natural dyeing. I am also informed the wood is pretty useful to but am not into woodwork so don’t know. I do know that Elder has a lot of mythology associated with it, and in the depths of my memory I have something bubbling about it being bad firewood. I will look it up. Naturally as it is such a useful plant the Council seems to take great pleasure in chopping it down. Every time I find a reliable source of flowers along comes the Council and next year I find it over- enthusiastically cut back! I have gone through ten sites so far. Fortunately its common, although it won’t be for long if the local Council have anything to do with it! Quite why they have this obsession with Elderflower I don’t know!
I have been making this for a few years now, with reliable results. I Googled ‘Elderflower Champagne’ on the net and came across discussions groups where people seem to have terrible problems with exploding bottles! I don’t know how they make it so difficult!
The moral of the story is that this is a fizzy drink so should be bottled in a suitable container. If you put it in a plastic lemonade bottle then it should be fine. (How some of these people managed to get these to explode is beyond me) If it looks as though too much pressure is building just open the top briefly to expel some gas. I have never had to do this yet! In the past I have bottled it in fizzy wine bottles. And survived!
I have been collecting a few flower heads for this recipe. Having read the problems some people have had I have this year, for the first time, put half in plastic containers and the rest in bottles!

2 heads of open elderflowers
1 lemon, juice and rind.
750 g or 1 and a half pounds white sugar
60 ml or 2 fluid ozs white wine vinegar
Water.

Rub bunches of elderflower heads together and place the florets in a bowl or bin, followed by the lemon juice, thinly peeled and cut up rind, sugar and vinegar.
Add cold water to make up the volume to 5 litres ( 1 gallon) and stir to dissolve the sugar. Leave covered for 24 hours.
Strain into strong screw top or heavy champagne bottles. Leave for two weeks at 20 degrees C when this drink should be semi sparkling and ready to drink.
If you are of a nervous disposition or of a dramatic nature you could wrap it in a duvet or whatever so if it does explode it contains any mess. I must admit as yet I have never found this necessary, but it seems some people out there are doomed to catastrophe.
Please note these are UK measurements.

A pleasant weekend bottling wine and making banana liqueur.

The weather was so gorgeous last weekend I felt almost human. I don’t know about you but I feel so much more energetic when the sun is out but its not too hot. I have been meaning to bottle some of my home made country wines for ages. As I prefer to do this out of doors I took the chance while the weather was nice. I can certainly think of worse ways to spend a Sunday afternoon than bottling, and simultaneously drinking (!) some wine.

I had some bottles of lemon wine left and when I opened one it had become sparkling. It was a little sharp, probably because the last of the sugar had converted to alcohol so I added a few sweeteners. This turned it into a pleasant light sparkling drink.

I never stick to the rules and sometimes it catches me out. Berry suggests you should keep accurate records of what you have done, but I never can be bothered. Now normally I know what is in a demijohn, but although I knew one contained honeysuckle wine, I have no idea what on earth the other contained as I had forgotten to label it. In any case neither are ready to drink so I bottled them, labelling one set ‘indeterminate’. As some of my cider was starting to clear I syphoned that off into a new demijohn.

indeterminate, cider, honeysuckle and sparkling lemon wine

In a fit of enthusiasm I also carried on with my liqueur making binge and made some banana liqueur - heres the recipe .

Banana liqueur

7 medium ripe bananas

750 ml brandy

400g sugar.

250 ml water.

Peel and slice bananas thinly

Place the bananas in a clean glass container with a tight fitting lid. Add the brandy, close tightly and leave to stand for five weeks in a warm spot. Shake regularly.

Pour the mixture first through a clean, dry sieve and then through four layers of cheesecloth. Set aside. Mix the sugar and water in a heavy bottomed pan and stir until the sugar has melted. Bring to the boil and boil for 12 minutes. Remove the syrup from the stove and leave to cool. Add the flavoured brandy to the cold syrup. Pour into a clean dry sterilised bottle and store for at least a month before use.

Blackberry Whisky

Due to popular demand I am putting up the recipe for this. I didn’t make any this year due to the wedding but definately will next year. Leave for as long as possible before drinking (within reason!)…..it improves with age.

400 g ( 14 ozs) blackberries

200 g (7 ozs) sugar

426ml ( 15fluid ozs) whisky

15 ml ( 1 tbs ) glycerol

5ml ( 1 tsp) citric acid .

Put alternate layers of blackberries and sugar in a wide necked jar and add the glycerol, citric acid and whisky. Cover the jar and leave for two days. Gently shake twice daily for the next three weeks before straining through a fine muslin cloth, gently squeezing the fruit to extract as much juice as possible. Return to the jar and allow to clear. Decant into clean dry sterilised bottle/s and keep for 6 months before drinking.

From The art of making wine and liqueurs by Betty Sampson

Pear Liqueur

As promised.

pear liqueur

The strawberry liqueur I made a few days back is coming along fine ( right), so as I had a glut of pears I have made some pear as well. Its interesting that both the kilner jars hold approximately the same amount of liquid, it doesn’t look as though they do, does it? This is another recipe from Jean Dixons book.

2 cm piece of peeled ginger root.

500 g sugar

500 ml dry white wine

500 ml gin

500 g fresh table pears

5 whole cloves

Halve, seed and slice the pears

Place the pears, cloves, ginger and sugar in a heavy bottomed pot. Add the wine. Heat over a low heat and stir until the sugar has dissolved. Bring to the boil.Remove the syrup from the stove and leave to cool.

Add the gin to the cold syrup. Pour the mixture into a clean glass or earthenware container, close tightly and leave to stand for a week in a warm spot . Shake every morning and evening.

Strain the mixture through two layers of cheesecloth, repeating if necessary.

Pour the liqueur into a dry sterilised bottle. Store for a month before use.

my wooden thing has gone funny!

I am a bit worried about my wooden fruit crusher. A useful tool but it seems to be suffering from the pounding and has started to split…..the nurse in me thinks this is very unhygenic,so its going into some bleach ( sorry folks I KNOW its not very green but I would rather be ungreen than down with food poisoning) I have had it drummed into me that wood is not a good thing to use in kitchens…too many germs…hard to make clean, traps germs ..you name it…on the other hand it IS useful, so I may try sticking it together and bleaching it regularly…If anyone knows where I can get another one of these in the UK I would be grateful, I looked on Ebay etc but couldnt find one.

A germ trap if ever I saw one!

Strawberry liqueur

I am told Strawberry Liqueur is rather sweeter than the other fruit liqueurs, because strawberries are naturally a sweeter fruit. It is recommended  poured over pancakes, or over the sponge in a trifle, and if you take a galia melon, cut it in half, and fill the middles with strawberry liqueur and perhaps a little sugar, with a garnish of rose petals or mint leaves, I gather you have a very impressive pud for very little effort! I will try it with pancakes for sure!

Cider traumas

I have has an aweful weekend, my ex decided to vist and is his want decided to tidy up…the result? Within two minutes he had broken the fruit press someone had lent me. Now its bad enough to break something, its even worse when you break something that isn’t yours but its even WORSE when its not even you who did the breaking. The result is that I have had to spend half the weekend sorting it out….. the matter is now resolved, in  my favour! Say no more! To date I have made two gallons, I am going to make some more over the next few days..I hope I like it after all this! My temporary glitch meant I had to top up one of the gallons with commercial apple juice, it will be interesting to see if there’s any difference. Unfortunately I don’t have enough pears to make any perry, so I pickled some instead. I will pop up the recipe for that over the next few days,SO much nicer than some ‘orrible bought pickled pears I got from the shops, revolting! Pickled pears go nicely with ham, cheese or duck I have discovered…

Cider making

OK, I have never made cider before but I have pounds of apples, and as I like cider I thought I would give it a try. The main thing that has put me off is that I dont have a cider press, and pressing the apples looks like hard work! I did try if for apple wine and swore I would never do it again. However someone told me its a lot easier if you freeze them first. It needs 20 lbs of apples to make a gallon! I am chopping away and bunging them in the freezer. I’ll let you know how I get on. Despite being told its OK to use windfalls I am still methodically cutting out the nasty bits! I have put up a couple of cider recipes on the home brewing link if you want to try, one for a fairly small amount (1 Gallon!)

most of them are sound Bramleys

Mad about craftwork of all kinds

I spend as much time as I can spare doing just about everykind of craft that you can think of, knitting, crochet, rug making, embroidery, and so on and so on. So if you like any of those things why not join me? My other passion is BORIS ( the wondercat) He has his own blog, but just to make sure you know who he is here is his profile.

8 years old, tragically struck down with Pancreatitus (aged 3!) which gave him diabetes, plus a cardiac murmur and funny kidneys. But he triumphed over it all.  Heres his pic, isnt he wonderful?

Hes waving hallo, lethargically