Experimenting in the Kitchen...

...is sometimes a great idea, and sometimes... not.

Last Saturday, after all of my previous canning and jam/jelly making, I thought I'd try to make some apple jam, using crab-apples. So I found a recipe for Caramel Apple Jam that sounded like it would be pretty good. The only thing was that with crab-apples I would have to put them through a food-strainer instead of chopping them—because they are just way too small to seed and chop. But, I thought, that will be OK because to make apple butter you just cook the apples and put them through the mill, so it would be kind of the same thing.

Well, in the first place the jam recipe says how many cups of chopped apples you need, which is probably not the same as milled apples. And, secondly, milled apples turn out to be the exact texture of applesauce. (Imagine that!) In hindsight, maybe I should have taken my hand-blender to them before I cooked them...  Third, how much sugar should you add to eighteen cups of applesauce to make it into apple butter/jam?

In the end, I guessed on the amount of sugar. I guessed at how much...well, instead of water I used apple juice. I guessed on the amount of pectin. And I guessed on the cinnamon and spices too.

I cooked up the apple...goo, but by the time I'd gotten that far I was sick of playing with apples and sick of canning for the day. It tasted strong, but ...Okaaayy, so I just poured it into jars and processed it in the canner. Then my eleven pints of apple-something-or-other sat on my counter for the rest of the weekend, and I continued to stew over them.

Well, the picture doesn't look half bad. But in real life it looks like really old applesauce.

I really didn't think anyone would eat it as jam since the texture is exactly like applesauce. And it kind of looks like food that's been on the shelves for twenty years already, even though it is fresh, so I couldn't envision my kids running to the shelves and looking at it and thinking, "Yum! Let's have some of that!" In fact, I didn't think I'd want to eat it. But I didn't want to just throw all my labor down the disposal either. Hmmmm.

This morning I opened up a jar of apple-goo and tasted it. The flavor is good, but strong! It is like cinnamon-applesauce concentrate: potent! One bite was as much as I wanted to eat. So I stirred in a little water, but it made no difference; I just really couldn't eat more than a tablespoon of this in one sitting—maybe even in a day. Well, after all, it was supposed to be jam!

So I made all my kids taste it. "What do you think of this?" I asked, after they tried it. "Would you want to eat it?" They all thought it was too strong, although Kaylie said it might be good on waffles or pancakes. Then Melanie happened to call me, and I asked her what she would do with it. She echoed my own thoughts: Throw it all out except for a couple of pints.

And then I had a stroke of genius! I would use it to make an apple cake. Maybe if I added no spices, and no. sugar. at. all, it would work out. So...four cups of flour, some baking powder, baking soda, salt, eggs and oil, a little vanilla, a drop of maple flavoring... The batter was gray, but didn't taste half bad.

Well, the timer is beeping even as I type..

It's a little ugly—I probably wouldn't give it to guests.
But how does it taste?

The cake smells good, but it is cracked and the inside is gray. The jam experiment didn't really work out...is there any hope for the cake? We are about to find out...