Blackberry and elderberry cordial

I noticed a little while ago that a fair number of blackberries were lurking in the hedgerow running down the side of the garden. A good proportion of these have now ripened, and so yesterday I decided it was time to harvest them. This is a hazardous endeavour, not only because of the prickly thorns on the brambles themselves, but also due to the ranks of stinging nettles lined up to defend them. Armed with long sleeves, long trousers and insufficiently long socks (resulting in stings all around my ankles) I ventured out, and before long had almost a kilogram of shiny blackberries, with a few elderberries chucked in for good measure.

Once the berries had been collected, we had to decide what to do with them, and although it was tempting to try and produce some wine or other alcoholic beverage we eventually plumped for the instant gratification of a cordial. Should you be inclined to try this yourself, here are some instructions:

• Put the berries in a colander and wash them under running water. Perform this step even if you would normally eat the blackberries straight off the bush as it will make your mother much happier about the whole enterprise.
• Remove errant snail from colander.
• Dump the berries in a big heavy saucepan.
• Add enough water so that the berries are all covered. Then chuck in a bit more for no apparent reason.
• Add some sugar. The amount of sugar should be equal to what is available in the cupboard minus the amount that will probably be needed for cups of tea later in the day. For us, this worked out to be about 400 g.
• Let the mixture simmer until the berries are starting to burst, or until you get bored, whichever is soonest.
• Realise that you don't have a sieve available, and so find a (admittedly jumbo-sized) tea strainer to use instead. One ladleful at a time, strain your berry mixture into a large bowl, using a spoon to squish as much of the juice out as possible. Find another bowl to put the leftover solids in.
• Use a potato masher to extract the last bit of juice from said leftover solids. Wish you had a bit of muslin, as that would make this step much easier.
• Sample a bit of the liquid, and be pleasantly surprised. Chuck in an arbitrary amount of cinnamon, and stir.
• Leave the cordial to cool, then bottle.

The cordial we produced by this method was actually rather nice. We used about one third cordial and two thirds water, and added a few drops of lemon juice before serving. Next time I would use slightly less sugar, but other than this minor quibble the whole endeavour was remarkably successful.