Happy shrove 🙂
Pancake day – the usual gathering of family and friends for en mass pancake making, tossing and eating.
This year I had lemon and sugar, chocolate button and maple syrup and sloe syrup.
Slow syrup was my idea to make something from the sloes we gathered last autumn, that wasn’t alcoholic. Sloe vodka is lovely, but there is a limit.. yes really, and being the only one that drinks in this house I wanted something the others could enjoy too.
So I covered the sloes with water, simmered for a while, drained, added an equal amount of sugar to the juice, cooked further until syrupy, and bottled it. Turns out there is lots of pectin in sloes, as it set, completely. I had to heat up the bottles to get it back out again – not so much sloe as slow syrup.
The addition of water and a re-cook, and we got there. Lovely on pancakes..and that’s number 11 of the 52 recipes – although sloes are magical in that even with lots of sugar, they are still dry. But tasty. Have to try it on ice-cream next.
Perhaps next time freeze the sloes first, to break down the cell walls where the pectin is?. This worked reasonably well with black currants when making syrup.
the sloes were frozen before i started…