It's Starting to Feel like Christmas

I was looking for some little gift that I could hand out to random people, but not look random, you know, I wanted it to say, I thought of you and put some effort into this.  It had to be cute, easy, and taste delicious.

I decided to make some jam, three different kinds, and some clay ornaments.  Not just any jam, but jam with chocolate, because nothing spells delicious like chocolate.

For the clay ornaments I purchased a tub of Crayola Clay, found almost anywhere that sells Crayola products, or here if you don't want to leave  the house.  http://www.crayolastore.com/product/13203   I had made some previously from a recipe I found on Pinterest, for air dry porcelain, I found however,

these looked cheesy and plastic when dried.  I just didn't like them, they looked really cheap to me.  The clay ones, were exactly the look I was trying to achieve.  I also purchased some stamps from the dollar bin at Micheal's to stamp them.  Cookie cutters gave them shape, and a straw poke provided the hole to put the twine in.

Jam is probably one of the easiest things to make.  It requires minimal ingredients, and equipment.  There isn't anything fancy about it, except you will have to buy some jars.  These are some of the things I bought, all at our local grocery store in one trip.

This is a list of what I actually bought, and what I made with those products.

2 600 g bags of frozen raspberries

2 600 g bags of frozen black sweet cherries

I package of Bakers unsweetened chocolate

1 -1 L box of apple juice

1- 5 pound bag of sugar

3 boxes of powdered pectin for making jam

I also purchased to cases of 250 ml jars from Canadian Tire, they carry them all year in Canada.

Following the directions for cooked jam making, inside the pectin box, (how easy is this, they provide the recipe for you), I made Chocolate Cherry, Chocolate Raspberry, and Apple Cinnamon.

If you would like to make the chocolate version, all you need to do it chop up three squares and add it to the fruit before you begin cooking.  The cinnamon for the Apple jelly is best mixed with the sugar, and then added.  Something I have done previously is to substitute one cup of sugar with Cinnamon hearts, it tastes delicious, and gives the apple jelly a lovely reddish colour.

This is the result of my jam making.

6 jars of apple jelly

7 jars of Chocolate Cherry

9 jars of Chocolate Raspberry

For each fruit jam you will need to use both bags of fruit, and 1 L of apple juice makes one recipe for apple jelly

So unrelated, but so cute, my owl herb garden, growing over the kitchen sink.  I Love the owls.

This is the finished product.

 I almost forgot the labels, these are just plain Avery Labels, and I went on line and used their template wizard, printed them out and easy peasy, labels.

A successful evening I would say, it took about 2 and a half hours from start to finish, and that included the clean up.  I hope you try this yourself, canning is a dying art.