Lady Marmalade

You know we've made jam before - well we'd never tried marmalade, so we thought it was about time we gave it a go.

After the Pickled Onion Incident I didn't fancy prepping the oranges as I thought it'd be a bit messy - so I saved myself some time, and got this kit from Lakeland

Pre-Prepared fruit £2.58 from www.lakeland.co.uk

It was perfect for me as you just add water and sugar. It didn't specify which kind of sugar, so I used a mix of granulated and caster, as that's what I had in the house. The instructions are really simple to follow too, so even if this is your first time jamming, you can't really go wrong. And minimum prep is alright by me.

So I slushed it all together into a pan, and brought it to the boil. At first it kinda looked a bit like cold soup, it was gross.

The tin says it yields up to 6lb of marmalade and I'll be honest - 6lb is way more than I thought it was! After a while it started to foam, which is perfectly normal, and it started to look like this - 

I think I need a bigger pan. So after about half an hour, I tested the marmalade to see if it had reached it's setting point. The easiest way to do this is put a saucer in the freezer. Drop a teaspoon of marmalade onto the frozen saucer and see if the surface of it wrinkles as you drag your finger through it. Since my marmalade wrinkled like a pro, I thought it was done.

I swooshed a few tablespoons of whisky into it (we like adding alcohol, here) et voila - here is the finished product!

Maybe not as much orange peel as I thought there would be, but it tastes lovely! And I got 6 of these large jars out of it too, so I think that was pretty impressive! The overall consensus is that I should make it again, so I probably will! What do you think - are you a marmalade fan? xox