Marie Cookpad

  I love this time of year when the hedgerows are beginning to fill up with wild blackberries. We grow our own in our garden as well.  This is the perfect time of year to make beautiful jams and baked treas with all of the bounty.  Cooking apples are coming into their own as well.  Combining the two into a fabulously tasty jam just makes sense.   We grow some really lovely cooking apples here in the UK.  They are called Bramley Apples and they are the UK's favourite cooking apple. Large, flattish, green in appearance, sometimes with a bit of a red flush, its flesh is white, juicy and quite acidic which makes them perfect for cooking with.  They turn into a frothy pulp when cooked, which makes them perfect for pies, cakes, applesauce and jams.   They go very well with blackberries, and you will often see them combined in pies and cakes, trifles, and other desserts/puddings here in the UK.  I think nature is so wonderful.  Ofttimes you wil...

   When I had a growing family, I made oodles and scads of jams, preserves, jellies and pickles every year.  I spent hours putting up fruit and veg from our garden for the winter and all of it got eaten. Now that there are only two of us, it just isn't practical anymore as it never gets eaten.  The only kind of preserving I do now, is small batch preserving.  That is what suits the size of our family most of all.   I love rhubarb preserves however and was recently inspired by the influx of early rhubarb in our shops to make a small batch for Todd and myself to enjoy, but with a twist.  This is Rhubarb, Vanilla & Cardamom Jam . . .  this is a delicious trinity of very good taste!    See how lovely and pink the rhubarb is?  It comes from an area in the UK known as the "Rhubarb Triangle."  This covers a 9 square mile area in West Yorkshire which is famous for producing early season Forced Rhubarb.     This rhuba...

Today I did something that I have been wanting to do for a very long time, but had never quite managed to get done for one reason or another.  I made Crystallised Rose Buds.  The time was right. Our wild rose bush was covered with blooms and tons of cute little pink rose buds.  I had nothing else to do, and so I just went for it.  I was thrilled with the results!   These are actually a lot easier to make than one would suppose and use only three ingredients, four if you count patience.  Rosebuds. Sugar.  Water.  That's it! Simple!   You want to pick really tiny rose buds.  You want them to still be pretty tightly closed . . . these ones work the best. Loose petals would fall off when you are crystallising them, which isn't exactly what we are looking for here. We want buds.    We don't use any pesticides on our flowers, so they are pure and organic.  It is really important to use pesticide free rosebuds.  You will wan...