Blackberry Jelly

So I've been on a roll with this Suzie Homemaker stuff as my dad calls it. Tonight Diane and I picked some more blackberries and I had just enough to make some blackberry jelly. If I didn't do the first part of it myself I would have taken pictures just so I have a reference in the future. Making the jelly was pretty simple, although I wouldn't recommend starting it at 8:20pm like I did. :-P

To get the juice you need 10ish cups of blackberries. After removing all of the bad berries, stems etc you mush the berries up. After they are good and mushed you strain them through cheesecloth to get the juice and rid them of seeds. Next time I'm doing this with my jam as it is way too seedy. Live and learn, right? So from that you need 3 cups of juice. Next you combine the juice, 5 cups sugar and 1/4 cup lemon juice in a large pan. Bring mixture to a rolling boil and add pectin, I used liquid pectin. Resume a rolling boil and stir constantly for exactly 1 minute. The next thing you know you have jelly! Well, what is going to be jelly. The mix gives you approx 3 pint jars (of course you have properly cleaned them beforehand and you have your canner heated and ready to go). Put the filled jars in the canner for 5 minutes then finally pull out and let sit at room temp for 24hrs. Presto, blackberry jelly!

The foamy stuff that I took of the top was pretty tasty so I look forward to giving it a try. Big shout out to my dad for helping me with the canning process, my grandmother for answering a million questions, Diane for letting me pick the berries and most of all my mother for providing the entertainment. She was doing Zumba the whole time. Haha. The pictures I do have won't upload, grr. Mom wants me to try peach on the next go around so we will see how that goes. Yippie! Oh, and my raspberry jam is quite good. It's just a bit seedy so next time I will use cheesecloth on that too.