Cherry Berry Jam

It's that time of year again!  To be completely honest I felt as though I would let this berry season come and go but my wonderful mother-in-law went and picked a basket of strawberries for me and that gave me the push I needed.  After the fact; I am thrilled! Mid-jam making; not so much!

Another neat thing my in-laws purchased for me was this handy strawberry huller that Aubrey is using.  What a nice surprise.

As we washed and hulled the strawberries, pitted the cherries and picked through the blueberries we measured them and added them directly into my ginormous pot!

16 cups of hulled strawberries

8 cups of blueberries

8 cups of pitted cherries

to the fruit I added

7 packages a no sugar needed pectin

1 cup of red wine (this time I used my inlaws black cherry wine)

zest and juice of 2 oranges and 4 limes

1/4 cup of vanilla

I let this come to a boil on high heat; stirring occasionally.

In the past I have cleaned and hulled my berries and then frozen them until I was ready to make the jam.  This works out perfectly fine other than it does take a long time to boil.  The process went rather quickly since I used fresh room temperature fruit.

 

 

Once this boiled I added in 4 cups of sugar and stirred this constantly until it boiled without breaking for 4 minutes.  I did do a taste test at this point to make sure it was the flavor I like; barely sweet and slightly tart. 

I allowed Aubrey to be in a photo with me and then asked her to move back.  At this point of the process sometimes there is hot splatter and you need to be careful with kids.  My shirt was covered by the end of 4 minutes of rapid boiling and that would of been right at the height of Aubrey's face.

 

Once the 4 minutes of boiling was over I removed the pot from the heat and started filling my sterilized jars.  By 9PM I had 28 jars filled and labeled.  This made about 24 cups of  "Cherry Berry Jam with lime and vanilla"; I used whatever jars I had on hand. I used these cute label stickers I purchased from Dollarama in their stationary section; they fit the tops of the jars perfectly.