Monday 30 December 2013

Home Made Bread Machine Jam


I went to visit a friend in the afternoon yesterday, I left with a bag full of fresh and very ripe plums from her mother's tree, perfect for making jam! As I am a lazy and only part-time lady of leisure, I like to take shortcuts as much as possible to still get the fancy result. Enter the bread machine. I bought mine about 18 months ago in a sale and generally I use it to make pizza dough and jam. All I have to do is chop fruit (and with berries I sometimes don't even bother with that!), dump it in the machine and an hour and a half later... JAM! Sometimes the jam can be quite runny but it doesn't bother me as I generally eat it mixed in with plain yoghurt anyway.


I made three kinds of jam today, using up the plums and other fruit I already had in the fridge from Christmas or stored away in the freezer. The mango/strawberry came out a bit runny, I think I needed more pectin or more boiling time, I think maybe the fact that the mango went in frozen had an affect because the bread machine runs on a timer.  I actually made the blackberry/plum jam in the pressure cooker and that was quite good, didn't take long and easy to clean up compared to the stove because the pressure cooker pot is bigger than my other pots.

Cherryberry- Cherry and Raspberry Jam
700g Cherries (de-pitted- resulting in what looked like a violent murder contained entirely on my bench-top)
300g frozen raspberries
500g CSR Jam Sugar
500g castor sugar
10-15g pectin (Jamsetta)


Blumberry- blackberry and plum jam:
600g chopped plums
400g blackberries
10-15g pectin (Jamsetta)
1kg sugar

Manberry- mango and strawberry jam:
300g chopped strawberries
400g chopped mango
10-15g pectin (Jamsetta)
700g sugar

These gorgeous labels were made using the Jam Labelizer, a website entirely dedicated to creating cute jam labels using one of a few different templates and adding your own details or pictures. I highly recommend! I also used Skip To My Lou to make a recipe card for the lemonade scones.

I also bought some cute little jars, Kleerview jam jar plastic and ingredients to make lemonade scones to make up a little gift pack for another friend who has just moved out with her boyfriend.  (Please excuse the placement of these pictures, I'm new to this and don't know why they're all over the place...)



I think the finished product has turned out to be really cute! Pressure cooker seems to give good results in terms of thickness, however I think I will just go back to using the Jam Sugar by CSR rather than trying to work with pectin on its own, as it seems a bit tricky when using different types of fruit.
Let me know what your favourite recipe or combination for jam is!

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