Week 16 - Making Jelly

We have a passionfruit vine that is taking over the staircase to the deck. It has been growing like crazy since we got here. The passionfruit are finally ready to be eaten. But I can't bring myself to eat them. Apologies to all passionfruit lovers but I find them so ugly (both on the outside and inside) that I just can't bear to eat them.



But I also can't bear the thought of them going to waste. So I came up with a solution. While I don't like the look of passionfruit, I do like the taste. So I decided to make up a batch of passionfruit jelly. That would use up a kg of fruit and I'd be able to eat it no problems.

Making jelly is very time consuming. Cutting up the passionfruit and scooping out the pulp was the most time consuming, followed by waiting for the juice to drip through the muslin.

The process is pretty simple - boil the fruit in water then strain the fruit out so you've just got fruit flavoured water. Then add sugar and boil again until it turns to jelly. Sounds pretty simple.



I followed all that pretty easily. Until I got to the last step (admittedly this was at 10pm so I was a bit tired).

Here's the instructions from the book: "Jelly should foam up high in the pan ... when the mixture jells, allow bubbles to subside".

It also said to boil for a minimum of 10 minutes. Well after 20 minutes it was still bubbling and I couldn't tell if it was jelling or not. I got the impression that I was supposed to wait for it to stop bubbling. That was wrong. It did not stop bubbling.



I finally took it off the heat when it started to darken as though it was burning. And I discovered I'd made a really nice batch of ... passionfruit toffee!!!



We have enough fruit out there that I may try again now that I know what I did wrong. Or I might make passionfruit ice cream topping instead. Or juice.

In other news P bought a chainsaw and put it to work this weekend cutting up the tree which fell down in the big storm. Great work!

Picked another couple of pumpkins and gave them away. Both weighing around 3.7kg. Definitely Crown pumpkins and worth $3 each in the local supermarket. Not saving a heck of a lot of money on those.

-M