The Stickiness Continues …. and what about the Slave Trade?

OK, so you are bored with my interminable attempts to sweeten the world by turning perfectly good fresh fruit into sugary sweetmeats, but what am I supposed to say?  I do all the work!  Alright, so I get to eat most of my creations as well …

Anyway, it all started back in January when I made orange marmalade.  Orange marmalade is made from Seville oranges, which are only available early in the year, so no one can blame me for buying a few more than I needed – after all, if I ran out I would have to wait for another year to make more!  But after having made about thirty jars of the stuff – and keep in mind that I only eat about three jars of jam a year, including non-orange marmalade ones – I decided to call a halt to the proceedings and utilise the leftover oranges for making candied orange peel. 

Since I love candied orange peel and eat as many as I can get a hold off this was a sound plan.  Unfortunately when I was finished I had about a quarter pot full of very thick sugar syrup left, which I stored in the fridge where it set solid.  So I couldn’t just use it up by putting it into my tea.

So when I discovered two weeks ago that Waitrose had organic oranges (normal, not Seville ones), I decided to make more candied orange peel (I had almost eaten the ones I made back in January).  I made lots!  It is extremely toothsome!  Following the advice of my friend MG, I cut the candied peel into strips and dipped them in 75% chocolate – delicious!  Simply delicious!  I did an excellent job, even if I say this myself, and now have enough to last me until Christmas, especially if I don’t give any of it away.

Unfortunately once again I had some very thick sugar syrup left.  Now what?  Buy even more oranges and candy enough to supply all my friends?  I was getting sick of my sticky kitchen!  Plus it is hard work candying orange peel!  So I came up with a new plan.

I bought some plums, cut them in half, removed the stone, and popped them into the heated syrup.  The plan was, I would just leave the plums in the syrup to slowly crystallize.  No more of this constant heating of syrup and removing of fruit and boiling up of the syrup again – just dump the plums into the syrup and one week later they would be candied and ready for eating.

Oh well.  It didn’t work like that.  Plums have a lot of water, a lot more than orange peels.  You can guess what happened.  The plums released all their juice into my nice thick syrup, shrank by half, and watered down my syrup – too thin to candy anything!  So once again I had to take out the fruit, boil up the syrup to reduce it, put the fruit back into it, etc etc – I am so darn sick of it all!  Mind you, the plums turned out to be delicious!  I ate four of them before they even properly dried.

But there are plenty more where they came from, because I am now saddled with not a quarter pot full of sugary liquid, but half a pot full of the stuff!  At this rate I’ll be candying non-stop between now and Christmas …

But lest you wonder, I have not spent my entire spare time last week candying fruit and dipping them into chocolate.  All these sugary endeavours reminded me of a heavy tome of a book about the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which I unearthed from a dusty shelf and have been reading all week.  The sweet tooth of Europe was directly responsible for the slave trade, because slaves were needed to grow and process sugar cane.  It was people like me, addicted to candied orange peel and similar vices, who caused untold misery to millions of abducted Africans, but I have to admit to my shame that even after having read the first 400 pages of the weighty treatise I have not foresworn sugar.  As a matter of fact, I was drinking tea and eating candied orange-peel-sticks-dipped-in-chocolate while reading the book!

Kick me, someone!