Yummy Berry Cordial

So, Dear Readers, for my first How-To I'm going to share my recipe for Yummy Berry Cordial.
The first thing you need to get is a glass bottle or two. You can use old wine bottles (it has to be ones with corks) but I like to use the pop top ones. You can get them really cheaply from IKEA. You then need to serilise them by filling them right to the top with boiling water and leave it for about 15 minutes.

Now, you need to decide which berries you'd like to use in your cordial. I've made a pure raspberry one before, and a cranberry one, but this time I made a mixed berry one so you need to grab yourself a couple of bags of frozen berries from the supermarket. I used three bags for mine and they're 500g each.

You'll now need some herbs and spices to flavour your cordial with. I wrapped up a thumb-sized piece of ginger, a bay leaf, a couple of cloves, a star anise, three allspice berries and three black peppercorns into a piece of muslin (the Monkey is now less one muslin square) and put it in a pan along with the berries and a cinnamon stick. I added two litres of cold water and turned the heat on.

As the water starts to warm you need to add sugar to the pan. Use around 800g but you can add more or less to taste so start off with less and then you can add more. When the sugar has dissolved, bring the mixture up to the boil and then cover and simmer for around an hour until the mixture in the pan has gone syrupy (like cordial, duh). Don't forget to keep checking and stirring your cordial mixture. I did once and it took me days of soaking to get it off the bottom of the pan!

When your mixture is all syrupy and the berries have gone all smooshy then you can add some lemon juice to lift the flavour of the berries. A couple of tablespoons should be enough but again, add it to your taste.

If you want to give your cordial as a gift or if you want it to last longer than a week in the fridge then you can add some citric acid to it as a preservative. You can buy it from chemist and you'll need to dissolve 20g in the cordial at this stage and then check the taste again. If the cordial is a bit too thin and runny then you can always reduce it a bit more on the hob.

Leave your cordial to cool slightly and then filter it through a seive (I put the rest of the Monkey's muslin square in the seive too) and then pour it into your sterilised bottles. You can then add labels and a pretty bow perhaps.

It's great to give these away as presents but, to be fair, the cordial tastes so good that you'll want to be really selfish! I like to drink mine mixed with soda water and ice but it's also a really good alternative to mulled wine if you serve it hot. If your tastes run to the perverse you could even try a little of the cordial syrup poured over vanilla ice cream. Mmm...