Made some elderflower cordial

[featherstick]

Son was playing in a Scouts football tournament at the weekend, and much as I love him there's only so much standing around one can do, so I took a supermarket bag-for-life and headed into the hedgerow to pick elder flowers.

Recipe as follows:

One nearly-full bag-for-life of elderflower bracts
Strip the flowers off the bracts and put into a couple of large pots
Add a kilo of sugar and a cut up lemon or two to each pot
Pour over boiling water until flowers covered
Weight flowers down with plate and a filled jamjar
Leave for a day to steep (or two days if you have a cold place)
Strain off the resulting cordial into jars or similar

At this stage you can freeze it to keep it. However our freezer is small and full, so I bottled it.

Cleaned some old juice bottles that I had
Sterilised the lids by boiling
Sterlised the bottles by heating in an oven to 80-100C
Brought the cordial to a soft boil.
Bottled it up (jam funnel really helps here)
Seal while hot.

The above made 5 litres. Next time I do it I'll use less sugar and more elderflower to the same amount of water as what I have is a very sweet, slightly elder-y cordial, but it will be refreshing nevertheless, and welcome in winter.

[Decaff]

Fantastic! Thanks for posting the recipe.