Damson Jelly

Please stop sniggering long enough to read this very serious post on jelly making! Mr CC and I went to a local antiques fair last month and I was delighted to find a ceramic cone jelly mould. Once I’d checked it over for cracks and found none, I was so excited I almost forgot to haggle. Almost! My vintage mould cost me £12, which seems ridiculously cheap.

Making a jelly with damsons as beautiful as these cannot result in anything less than deliciousness!

Ceramic, like glass, can be a nightmare for turning out jellies therefore I made this jelly much firmer set than I usually would. Also, this mould is tall and tapers towards the top making it far less stable than a lower, rounder jelly. I gave the very tip of the mould a squirt of cake release spray and I think this helped (you don’t taste it).

Turning out a jelly is always a heart in your mouth moment but thankfully, this one came out perfectly. As you can see, it suffered a little with “Brewer’s droop” but that didn’t matter as it caused mirth all round...a little too much mirth perhaps, we reverted to 5 year olds. And yes, I am fully aware of what it looks like!

Damson plums have such a lovely fruity flavour that they are perfectly suited to jams and jellies. Didn’t it come out a pretty colour?

Ingredients

Note – this is the basic quantity for the jelly – you can scale it up as required but allow extra setting time. For my mould I used 1.5x the quantities.
8 leaves gelatine
750g damsons – washed, but no need to stone
225g caster sugar
600ml cold water

To serve: cream

Method

Start by soaking the gelatine leaves in cold water until they are soft.
Place the damsons, sugar and water in a saucepan and heat gently until the sugar has dissolved.
Simmer further and mash the damsons with a spoon or – and I found this really productive – the masher you’d use to make mash potato.
The stones will naturally come out of the fruit and be captured in the next stage.
Pass through a sieve and return the liquid to a clean pan.
Heat gently and then remove the pan from the heat.
Squeeze all the water from the gelatine and whisk into the damson juice – it will dissolve very quickly.
Leave the jelly to cool a little.
Pass through a sieve into your chosen mould – sieving again will strain out any bits that passed through first time.
Chill until set – I left overnight.
Turn out of the jelly mould any way that you find works for you! For this ceramic mould we stood it in warm water for a minute then gave it a vigorous shake!
Serve with cream.
Bask in the glory of the wonderful thing you have made.
Eat.