Tea Jelly!

Well, I lied. I am going to do one more post before bed. The baby is down in his crib, but I'll make one more post before I hit the pillows.

This time I want to post about the jelly that I made in December. I wrote last year about how I was excited to make this jelly as a gift for family and friends. The tea I used was one of Steeped Tea's blends: Christmas Chai! Ooooh, it smelled DIVINE. Rich and warm and deep, like sliding into a hot tub or relaxing by the fire in fuzzy PJ's. Oh, it was most heavenly. 

Anyhoo, I used a recipe I had found on Pinterest. I had never canned anything or made any kind of jelly before in my life, so this was a completely new experience.

My ingredients: tea, lemon juice, powdered pectin, and sugar. H2O not pictured. Simple, right?

Now, a problem I have is not really following recipes to an absolute T. After making several observations about the fact that this recipe was NOT in fact going to give me as big a batch as I'd hoped, and seeing that 1.5 cups of water was going to pretty much dissolve into steam as I boiled it, I added an extra .5 cup. Plus, I had to steep 12 BAGS OF TEA and dissolve 3 CUPS OF SUGAR in 1.5 CUPS OF WATER. It just didn't seem right, but I was nervous about deviating any further from the recipe.

After steeping my tea in the boiling water, I added the other ingredients and then stirred, boiled, and added where necessary according to the recipe. The recipe itself was kind of vague and did not tell me about whether or not I needed to prep the jars in any way or if I needed to put the lids on right away after pouring the jelly. In short, I was doing a lot of experimentation. Where was Elliot, you ask? Oh, it was Sunday. The grandparents had hold of him. 

The pre-canned jelly looked and smelled a lot like syrup, and was a rich, golden brown color that of course smelled divine. My stove top was sticky and gross and the burners were stained with residue from where the stuff had accidentally boiled over, but I was pleased with the result.

Canning the jelly was more difficult than I had anticipated. For one thing, I didn't read until later that there is a process to prepping jars for any kind of canning, and of course I had been dumb enough not to realize that. I poured the hot jelly into the jars and then put the lids on and stuck them in the refrigerator. The recipe was very unclear about this part, so I put a few in and left a few out to observe the "setting." According to the recipe, the jelly would set within 2 hours. But still after 2 hours, the jelly (both refrigerated and not) had not set even a little. Bewildered and flustered, I gave up the attempts and told myself I would fix things at my parents' place when I visited them for the holidays. 

That did not happen. 

Neither did the cute cloth can-topper I had envisioned and bough special cloth for (at a bargain price, too). I consider myself crafty, but I had not planned the thing out very well, and so only a few cans got "topped."

I even added gold ribbon and my business card! Ignore the diaper bag in the background.

When I got home, my focus was getting that jelly to set right. I added more pectin to each batch and re-filled the jars. This time, the jelly set right, and I was able to give them out as promised to friends and family in time for Christmas (and after that, too). 

I took several lessons from this. 

1. Don't wait until 2 weeks before Christmas to start DIY Christmas gifts.

2. Plan everything out step by step.

3. Do a practice run, especially if it's something you've never done before.

I'm the kind of person who has to jump in the water in order to learn how to swim. Silly analogy, but there you go. I learn by plunging in head-first, experimenting, and making mistakes. On the other hand, doing that sort of thing for crafty Christmas gifts probably isn't the best idea! But I had a lot of people compliment the taste, and certainly I had a few inquiries as to its construction and flavor. It's definitely a project I would do again!