Lemon Orange and Elderflower Marmalade

As I was saying the other day, (in a round about sort of way), it's the start of the season of fruitfulness, gooseberries in the garden, elderflowers sprinkling the hedgerows with their intoxicating scent, strawberries and redcurrants ripening.

I made elderflower cordial last week, and reluctant to chuck away the sliced lemons and oranges, cast about for a means to use them up - after all, it's not as if they'd been boiled for hours or anything, simply steeped in elderflower infused sugar syrup.

A friend had already offered Darina Allen's very sensible use for the lemon slices - freezing them and using in G&Ts, but I recalled a marmalade that I've made before, and wanted to recreate it.

This is a lovely, floral marmalade -  I really can't recommend it highly enough. If you've made elderflower cordial, it's pretty easy to make - and quite forgiving. Life kept intervening so it took me the best part of 3 days to get from infused slices to jars of marmalade, which finally materialised on Sunday morning.

If you haven't made elderflower cordial, you'll have to find a different recipe. Obvs.

Lemon Orange and Elderflower Marmalade

3 lemons and 3 oranges, thinly sliced, retrieved once you strained your elderflower cordial into bottles. You can bin the elderflowers though - they will have had it by now.

1kg (give or take) caster sugar
300ml elderflower cordial
4-5 sterilised jars

Put the sliced fruit into a pan, just cover with water and bring to the boil.

Simmer gently until the peel is really soft - it took about an hour but it could take up to 2.

Strain and reserve the liquid, and chop the fruit up as finely as you like, taking care to remove any pips as you go.

Weigh the fruit and then measure our double the amount of sugar. I had approximately 500g of fruit, so I used 1 kg of sugar.

Measure the reserved boiling liquid and add the 300ml of cordial. If necessary make the amount up to the equivalent liquid measure as the sugar using tap water - so for my 1 kg of sugar, I had 1 litre of liquid.

Put the chopped fruit, sugar and 1 litre of liquid into a suitable pan, bring to the boil and keep going till you reach setting point. 

How you test to confirm this I leave up to you - jam thermometers, cold plates. I suffer terribly from what I call 'setting point stress' and usually combine at least 2 methods. In this case, 105C on the jam thermometer and cold plate worked.

Decant your marmalade into jars, and Bob, as they say...