Lønnestræde's Christmas Jam

No Christmas without cooking my very own Christmas Jam using Danish blackberries, vanilla and cognac. And I am ready now for Christmas to arrive with or without some more snow.

Ingredients:

• 1000 g (Danish) blackberries
• 500 g sugar
• 20 g gelling powder (citrus pectin, sugar and citric acid)
• ½ vanilla pod
• 3 cl cognac

• Put the blackberries into a cooking pot. Add the gelling powder and agitate.
• It is important NOT to add the sugar at this stage, as the gelling powder need the water from the fruit to hydrate sufficiently.
• Bring the fruit to the boiling point and let it boil for 2 minutes

• Remove the vanilla corns from the vanilla pod. Save the vanilla pod for making home-made vanilla sugar.

• Add the sugar to the fruit. It is very important, that you add the sugar little by little, while you agitate, in order to pre-gelling/gel lumps in the jam.
• Bring the fruit and sugar to the boiling point again and boil for another 2 minutes.
• Add the cognac to the jam, after you have remove the cooking pan from the heat.

• Prepare the jam glasses by filling them with boiling water. I do not use any preservatives in my home-made jam, so this is important to increase shelf-life of your jam.
• Another thing you can do is to store the jam cold afterwards.
• As the jam is made from 2 parts of fruit and 1 part of sugar, the sugar content is not high enough to preserve the jam.
• Fill the glass with jam and close the glass.

Now the Christmas Jam is made, and I am ready to either enjoy the jam myself or use it as hostess gifts.