So one thing I like to do around the end of Summer/ start of Autumn is rooting around for wild fruit and making them into something tasty and unhealthy. This year we have had an abundance of brambles as well as some unexpected plums as well as some big green apples.
Brambles are my favourite! I’m always impatiently waiting for them to turn ripe enough to pick and more often than not, you can find me chowing down on them while they are still a bit red and suck your face in sour (yum). One of my favourite things to make with brambles is jam…jam on toast is the breakfast of Gods and my weekend treat (I’m not sad, you are). So, the first thing I made with all my goodies was a couple of jars of this lovely sticky nectar…and it is super easy to make. All you need are equal parts of blackberries and sugar and some lemon juice…and that’s it! I added all the ingredients to a heavy bottomed pan and left to simmer on the cooler plate of the Aga for a little longer than the recommended 10 mins as it was still a little runny. I put a saucer in the freezer and test the jam by adding a little to the cold plate…if it wrinkles when you push a finger through it, that means it is ready…if not, pop it back on the heat for a little longer and test again. I used the BBC Goof Food recipe which can be found here .
The next bake I attempted was a blackberry and apple loaf which was a new recipe for me. This was another simple recipe, although I did make a bit of an error out of pure laziness. The first step is to rub butter, flour and muscovado sugar with your fingers until it forms fine crumbs. I chucked it all in the electric mixer and rather than looking like crumbs, it ended up as a stiff, stickyish dough…oops. I powered on though and added the rest of the ingredients (grated apple, orange zest, eggs and baking powder) and followed the recipe properly this time and it still ended up looking like a decent cake mixture. This one took a while to bake, an hour and 20 mins in total but it was so worth it! I ended up drizzling some icing over the top seeing as I had messed up the topping…and also just because I love icing! This was another BBC Good Food recipe and can be found here.
The last bramble bake I made this year were some cupcakes with bramble icing. Technically these weren’t actually cupcakes but cut outs from a large sponge for a birthday cake I was making but dropped a heavy knife on top of and left a big hole! However, I topped the little sponges with blackberry icing and oh my word, if you do one thing, you need to make this icing!! It is absolutely delicious! For the icing I combined butter, icing sugar and a drop of vanilla essence and whisked until light and fluffy. I then sieved the blackberries and added the puree to the icing before folding in. I didn’t add any milk to the icing like I usually would in case it made it too runny with the added puree and it ended up pretty much the perfect texture. The icing also turned a really pretty pinky purple hue and I’m not kidding when I say how good it tasted! The recipe I used came from, you guessed it, BBC Good Food and can be found here.
We also usually make bramble gin or vodka but I haven’t got round to it yet this year, however, we still have plenty of brambles left and this is what I plan on doing asap!
Okay, so moving away from brambles and onto plums! We have a tree that sporadically produces plums but we weren’t expecting any this year…we could not have been more wrong! Unfortunately I didn’t notice until it was almost too late and a lot had been chomped by beasties or started to go off but I still managed to rescue a good sized haul. I decided to make some more jam as in my opinion, you can never have too much. As with the bramble jam, this is super easy to make, just equal parts fruit and sugar, plus some lemon juice. I didn’t follow a recipe for this, although I did make sure to use jam sugar as I’m not sure that plums are overly high in pectin, however, I could be wrong about this. Anyway, I added all the ingredients and as before, left to simmer until the sugar dissolved. I then moved the pan onto the hot plate and left to boil for a further 5-10 minutes before testing on the cold saucer.
Changing things up a little this time, I decided to try my hand at some spiced plum chutney which I haven’t made before. You won’t be surprised to know that I used a BBC Good Food recipe! Now, I was confused before I even began as the recipe asked for 1kg of plums, halved, stoned and finely chopped and I couldn’t figure out if this meant 1kg before or after removing the stones. I asked everybody I knew, including the Instagram community but was left with pretty much a 50/50 response which was no help whatsoever. I ended up using 1kg before removing the stones, whether this was right or not, I’ve no idea but in all honesty, I don’t think it would make a drastic difference either way. I added everything apart from the sugar and left for 10 minutes before realising I’d halved the recipe but had accidentally added the full amount of chilli flakes…whoops, hope you like it hot! I then added the sugar and left to boil for half an hour but it was definitely far too runny after this time (possibly due to weighing with stones?) so I left it on the heat for quite a lot longer then the recipe stated. Once it looked to be the right consistency I took it off the heat and poured into jars. The end result? A bit hotter than I would have liked but actually really yummy! You can find the recipe I used here.
I then decided to try my hand at some blackberry chutney as I came across another recipe, and by this time we had cake coming out of our ears so wanted to make something that didn’t need to be consumed immediately! I added blackberries, red onion, ginger, sugar and dijon mustard to a pan and stirred over the heat (I also squished the blackberries with a potato masher which it didn’t say to do but I am far too impatient to wait for them to burst). I then added the vinegar and seasoned before leaving to simmer for a lot longer than the recommended 10 minutes, until I was happy with the consistency. I’m not going to lie, it looks a bit like chilli in the jars but it tastes really good…quite different to any chutney I’ve tried in the past but very yummy! As with everything else in this post, I used a BBC Good Food recipe (what can I say, it’s my favourite) and you can find it here.
I didn’t realise how easy it is to make chutney and this is definitely something I am going to experiment with a lot more from now on so any recipes will be welcome!
Now I know I haven’t mentioned the apples I picked other than in the bramble and apple loaf but that’s because I didn’t actually make anything else with them…my Mum took charge of these and made a rather lovely apple crumble!
I hadn’t intended for this to be a post on it’s own but I ended up making such a number of things that it just ended up that way. My favourites have definitely been the bramble jam and plum chutney as well as the bramble icing (omg what a find!) but I can’t wait to make some more creations soon…I’m definitely going to need to invest in more jars!
Until next time…
Kirsty x
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