After my beginners luck with the peaches I moved on to the Claude Reine plums. I made a very nice but not unusual plum preserve. It has a pleasant yellow green color and is sweeter than a traditional plum jam. Then full of confidence I attempted plum jelly. I picked a load of purple plums (on both the inside and out) at a friends house when I was in California and thought it would make a pretty, smooth, deep purple spread. I cooked the fruit with a little water and sugar and then strained it all through a colander. There was no big chunks but it wasn't clear either, but that was OK by me. I then followed the instructions on the Sure-Jel package (cooking with copious amounts of sugar and boxes of powdery pectin) in the hopes of getting it to set up after it's water bath. No such luck. I had ten half-pints of plum liquid. About a week later I tried again - following the instructions for "If your jam doesn't set up". I emptied all ten jars into a the big soup pot, added more sugar and more pectin. Water bathed them all again, and again, no luck. Still plum liquid. Soooo....now I am calling it plum syrup and am hoping to find some suitable syrup bottles with sealing lids and redo the whole thing. Live and learn I guess, except I still don't know exactly what I did wrong....so much for the learning part.
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