Crab apple jelly with organic essential oils

Autumn is apple jelly making season. This year we tried our hand at making crab apple jelly using organic essential oils. One batch we made with Florame aromatherapy's ginger essential oil. The other batch with organic clove essential oil. Either will give a real kick to your jelly. However, you can experiment with your own essential oils. In past we’ve made apple jelly with organic lavender essential oil and with organic sweet orange essential oil. Both are gorgeous.

To make the crab apple jelly:

Ingredients
2.5kgs/5.5lbs of crab apples washed & cut into halves.
1.75 ltrs/3 pints of water
2-3 drops of either ginger essential oil or clove essential oil
Sugar

Equipment
2 x large saucepans or jam making pans without lids
Jelly straining cloth
Large bowl
Several clean and sterilised jam jars with lids
Wooden spoon
Saucer (placed a freezer drawer or the fridge if no freezer available)
Teaspoon
A friend with a pair of oven gloves to hold your jam jars when you pour in the jelly

Put the crab apples in the saucepan & cover with the water. Bring to the boil then simmer for approx 1-1.5hrs until the fruit has turned into a mash. Whilst this is happening you can sterilise your jam jars. I use the same sterilisation liquid as you would for baby bottles. Once you’ve sterilised them, rinse them off then turn them upside down and put them in a low heated oven to dry off slowly.
Once the apples have turned to mash, suspend the jelly cloth over the bowl and strain the mash into it. Let the liquid juice from the mash strain out. Now, traditionally you’re supposed to leave the mash to strain through overnight without squeezing it so that the liquid is clear of must. However, if you’re impatient like me, after about an hour or so (once the mash is cool enough to handle) I start to squeeze the cloth to extract the maximum amount of liquid. Once this is done, discard the mash, rinse the jelly cloth through then strain the liquid through the jelly cloth again in order to get rid of any must. If you don’t do this your jelly will look cloudy in the jar rather than clear. The end result is that, rather like when you’re making wine, you should be able to see a lit candle with clarity whilst looking through your jar of jelly.

Once you’ve strained your liquid, measure it out into the other large saucepan. For every 600ml/1pint of liquid, add 450/1lb of sugar. Now, I like my crab apple jelly slightly tart so I tend to go for 400g of sugar per pint but this is purely a matter of personal taste.

Turn the heat up to maximum and stir in the sugar with the wooden spoon until it has dissolved. Then add your chosen drops of Florame organic essential oil. Start with 2 drops and taste. If you want a stronger flavour add 1 drop more, taste again and so on until you have the perfect blend. The jelly should start to boil rapidly in the saucepan. Whilst it’s boiling you’ll see an opaque film appear on the top of the jelly, skim this off every few minutes. Let it boil for approx 30mins. Then test whether it has reached setting point – take your saucer out of the freezer, trail a teaspoon of jelly on the saucer, wait about 5 seconds then draw the jelly towards you with the teaspoon. If a ripple appears as you do this setting point has been reached. If not, let the mixture continue to boil for another 5-10 minutes and try again. Remember to keep your saucer cold.

Once setting point has been reached, turn off the heat, take the jelly off the boil and pour into the jam jars. Once cool, tighten the lids on the jars, label and enjoy. You could of course go the whole hog and decorate the jars to give as unique personal gifts to friends and family.