CHERRY JELLY

Making jelly can be easy or hard depending on the equipment you have.  A dear friend of mine decided she was getting too old to fuss with making jams and jellies and so she loaned to me, on a permanent basis, her steam juice extractor.   It is a wonderful toy to use to make juice.  With the bumper crop of cherries in my backyard, I decided to make cherry jelly.

There are a number of methods you can use to get the juice from the cherries.  Using the steam extractor made it pretty easy to extract the cherry juice.

The brand name of the steam juice extractor I used to get the juice from the cherries. 

Set up on the stove to extract the juice.

The cherries just need to be washed.  You can leave the stems on and of course you don't have to pit the cherries. 

The cherry juice in the tubing used to drain the juice out of the pot. 

What the cherry juice looked like. 

I needed to measure the quantity of juice being extracted.

An inside view of the juice collected from steaming the cherries.

The finished product. 

INGREDIENTS:


3 1/2 cups of cherry juice
3 1/2 cups of sugar
1 tsp almond flavouring
1 box of certo pectin crystals

DIRECTIONS:


Add the juice to a large saucepan.  Add the pectin crystals and almond flavouring and mix well.  Bring the fruit to a rolling boil on high heat.  Stir in the sugar.  Return to a full rolling boil and boil for one minute, stirring constantly.   Remove from heat.  Stir and remove foam for the next five minutes.

Pour immediately into warm sterilized jars filling to within 1/4 inch from the rim.  Seal with warm sterilized lids.  Let stand at room temperature overnight before storing away.  Makes about 6 - 250 ml jars.  Adapted from www.kraft canada.com