Easy Homemade Blackberry Preserves
As I mentioned last week, we have a prolific amount of blackberries due to my Dad's blackberry patch. After making several Blackberry Cobblers, we still didn't seem to make a dent in the berries.
Sometimes in the middle of summer bounty, you can almost forget the bleakness of winter that is just 6 months away. Our Granny used to always put up peaches in the summer and get them out on Christmas morning. They were always a little frozen and slushy, and delicious on Christmas morning. A little breath of summer.
The thought of bottling a little bit of our carefree summer in the form of Blackberry preserves gave Emma and me a little motivation after school last week. I can't wait to get these out to top our biscuits for a snuggly fire-side breakfast this winter.
While I did consults some recipes, truth-be-told, I have no idea how much sugar is in our preserves.
That's what happens when I'm behind the camera and Emma is in charge.
I was shocked to find out how much sugar other recipes sited - ours was not nearly as sugar heavy. I wanted it to taste like fresh blackberries, not sugared jelly.
I think it was a little something like this :
6 cups of Blackberries
1 1/2 - 2 cups of sugar
juice of 1 lemon
Put it in a big saucepan and cook for maybe 30 minutes.
As I said, I wanted to preserve the taste of a fresh summer blackberry, so I didn't mash or smash or attempt to remove the seeds. Not only will they be more of the essence of a real summer berry, it was much easier. Much easier.
While the berries continued to simmer and thicken (cooking for almost 1 hour on low heat), I sterilized the jars in water for 5 minutes. Just make sure the water is simmering.
I removed the jars with tongs and put them on a pan for filling. Make sure jars are still hot when spooning in hot jam so the jars don't break.
I found that ladaling the mixture into a pouring measuring cup made filling very easy.
Our recipe made 5 jars.
I sealed the jars by submerging them in simmering water for 10 minutes and watching until there were no more bubbles coming out. For detailed canning instructions, try here.
Of course I needed some cute labels for our jars. I used the 2.5" Printable Circle Labels from my store. They come as 6 sheets of 12 for $5. I love having them around to make homemade goodies look great.
Here is the template download for the labels. You can personalize them, of course, for anything.
Now, if I could just bottle up this...
Happy Summer : )
