Bramble and Apple Jelly

The allotment has produced a glorious abundance of blackberries and cooking apples this season. Following my successful adventure in jam making earlier in the year, a friend described how his mother used to strain the cooked fruit to create seedless jam/jelly. Naturally this inspired me to want to have a go. Studiously I searched my recipe books and the internet and decided I needed to buy a jelly-straining bag. There is a comprehensive cookshop in town and I was able to buy a ‘jam muslin’. I thought I was all set to go and began stewing the fruit, then opened the jam muslin only to discover it wasn’t a neat funnel-shaped bag as anticipated, simply a highly expensive square of plain white muslin. I couldn't immediately work out how to use it!

I got out the sewing machine and began to set it up, but managed to get a piece of cotton jammed in the mechanism. Sewing isn’t one of my special talents, and I hadn’t managed to fix the sewing machine by the time I needed to leave to attend a meeting.

Someone at the meeting was able to describe how she used her jam muslin to line a large sieve and suspend it over the bowl that way, so when I came home, that is what I did, and left it over night. Next day I completed the process, sterilising the jars, boiling the strained juice with jam sugar, and bottling it once it had reached setting point. Happily the blackberry and apple jelly was a total success.