Those Hawthorn Berry Sweets
I've been meaning to post more on the Hawthorn Berry Sweets. It seems that there are a lot of people out there looking for more information on this at the moment. I get 2 or 3 visits per day according to the stats from people searching for Hawthorn Berry Sweets or Ray Mears! So here's to some more...
Anyway, I made the sweets and this is what they turned out like and how I did it...
First of all I tried squashing the berries by hand and mashing them through a seive which was totally unsuccessful as they were just hard, sticky and gooey and the seive just clogged up totally. I then tried adding a bit of water and got in a terrible mess and not much further forward.
Secondly I decided I'd cook the berries with a bit of water and mash them through the sieve after cooking. This worked better, but lost some of the lovely red colour as the pictures show. However I did manage to get a good bit of juice, which did eventually set and I dried it out enough to make some real fruit leather sweets. Yay!
Here's the photos.
Cooking the berries.
The resultant juice which eventually set!
Here's some already scooped out of the dried sweet stuff.
The final sweets. Rolled loosely on the knife I used to scrape the stuff from the bowl.
Verdict: OK - but a lot of trouble for a less than lovely outcome. Not sure I'd try it again... unless someone esle knows a better way of doing this.
2 comments:
Thanks for the post Simon. Reckon I'll have a go at the weekend.
Curious to know how much water do you think you added to the berries, how long did you cook them for and did you actually boil 'em?
I added just enough for them to bubble in. No more than 1 cm in the bottom of the pan and only boiled them briefly. I think some warm water and a good potato masher might do the trick better than a spoon and a sieve in hindsight.
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