Wild Rose petal jelly and elderflower champagne

Today involved some awesome foraging and cooking fun stuff.

We decided that we wanted to make rose petal Jelly and some elderflower champagne, especially as I found a pink elder flower bush :)

So firstly I used this recipe for the elderflower champagne and this is how its looking so far...all I would say, is that it wasn't easy to get rid of all the bugs...this is the first time I have tried it, so it might take a few attempts before I get it right...

I am hoping the pink will make it pink...I am also very grateful for having a load of cava bottles from my book launch party!

SO secondly I have always wanted to collect wild rose petals and make rose petal jelly....and today we spent 2 hours searching for wild roses and we managed it! We did include 3 red roses to add to the colour, but apart from that the rest were all wild...very satisfying...

So the recipe we used was from a book called Herb Sufficient by Christina Stapley, its an interesting book with alot of things in it...the basic recipe was:

90ish grams of rose petals (the more fragrant the better)

425ml cold water

100ml of liquid pectin

juice of 1/2 a lemon

900g of sugar

3 jam jars which equal about 1 litre in total or 2 kilner jars of 500ml each.

 
This is what they looked like. I used my Le Crueset heavy pan to do this as it kept the temp controlled better...

You pop the petals and the water in the pan and warm it up, BUT  don't boil it, or even simmer it, ist just below that, keep the lid on as you want to keep all the moisture in.

set the pan aside and leave to cool for 2 hours.

The petals will have lost all the colour, and the fragrance will be in the liquid.

Strain them, and then give the petals a good squeeze to get all of the moisture out, return the liquid to the pan and add the lemon juice.

Gently warm it, whilst adding the sugar until its all desolved, then heat it so its boiling rapidly, add the pectin and boil for 2 minutes, then pop in jars....

Comments

[pip]

a lovely day