By Jessica
Maybe you have experience making jam. Maybe you love anything lemon flavored. Maybe you have a lot of Meyer Lemons and you want to use them before they go bad. Maybe you are like me and 2 of those 3 things apply. I'll give you a hint, it's not the first one.
So...not being one to shy away from things I have no idea how to do but might scald me with boiling hot sugar, I dove in anyway and with mixed results. I chose not one but two recipes, because if you don't know what you are doing, you might as well REALLY not know what you are doing, right? Ha! Moving on, I went with one "straight" recipe for Meyer Lemon Marmalade and one not so traditional for Meyer Lemon Vanilla Bean Marmalade. During the ensuing mayhem, I tweeted my speculation about how things would turn out in the end and well I couldn't have been more wrong. My "straight" recipe turned out! It jelled properly (save for the jar I dropped and um, one inexplicible non jelled jar) even though I only used the saved seeds for pectin as instructed. The non-traditional recipe however is currently some very well canned, very tasty syrup.
I will be putting that batch all back into a pot and cooking it down some more to see if I can get it to actually jell this time...we'll see. In reading the comments on the blog, it looks like I am not the only one that experienced problems with the recipe following only the exact timing and not doing the plate test too. I guess that is where my inexperience with jelly making showed through as I followed the recipe EXACTLY but didn't know enough to go off recipe and TEST IT first.
If you decide to try the vanilla bean recipe, do yourself a favor and test some of your mixture on a cold plate BEFORE you can it to ensure it's going to set up once it cools down, unless of course you just want some really tasty syrup and I do mean REALLY tasty. I was drinking the excess right off the ladle over the warm pot.
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