Saturday’s Southfields Abundance winter event provided a snapshot of everything that is great about this initiative.
Over three hours at Southfields Lawn Tennis Club over 100 locals popped in to sample our various cider batches, buy bottles of cider to take home, admire our fruit picking and cider-making equipment and have a good chat.
We had MPs past (Justine Greening) and prospective (Sue Wixley). We had a strong turn out from the Elsenham Street massive. We had curious tennis club members. We had people who went to the wrong tennis club. We had one broken toe, on crutches.
People came because they had donated fruit, because we had picked their fruit, because they liked cider or just to support a local initiative. And it was lovely to see everyone.
Here’s what we do:
Over the summer we made loads of cider using apples and pears that would otherwise have gone to waste. A full list of the batches we made and where the fruit came from is here. Can you spot which batch was made from your fruit?
All credit to Richard and Simone Konig who drive this initiative and whose back garden is given over to cider making on summer Sunday afternoons (it’s great fun – come along!). Simone has been developing interesting flavoured ciders and on Saturday I tried cider flavoured with thyme, with anise and (my favourite) with fresh ginger – batch17.2 if you want to buy a bottle. We continue to experiment to find the best way of optimising the flavour of the fruit we are so generously given.
The good news is we are doing it all again on Saturday 7th December at St. Barnabas Christmas Fair. So if you had a bottle of our cider you particularly enjoyed come along and I can almost guarantee that we won’t have it (but we will have another batch that is equally yummy).
My part in Saturday’s bash was mainly the the production and sale of Hot Mulled Cider, which went down very well. I had several requests for the recipe so here is how I did it.
After extensive and highly enjoyable development sessions in my newly-truncated kitchen I decided the only way I could mull cider in volume was to create a mulling syrup which I could then add to heated cider. So it was off to Tooting Broadway, where I stocked up on spices from one of the independent Asian grocers there.
The recipe for the mulling syrup was:
g
Sugar 2000
Water 1500
Ginger (fresh)* 125
Cinnamon 100
Cloves 40
Allspice berries six
Star anise three
Mace six
Habanero pepper one
Freshly squeezed orange juice 750
* peeled and cut into julienne strips
Method
- Make a base syrup by heating the water and sugar together and stirring until dissolved.
- Add all other ingredients except the orange juice
- Bring to the boil and simmer for one hour
- Sieve to remove spices and cool to room temperature
- Add orange juice and mix thoroughly
- Chill (will freeze until needed)
Making the cider
- Heat 3 litres cider in a large saucepan with stirring until hot but not boiling
- Add 300ml mulling syrup (so one part syrup to ten parts cider)
- Stir and serve
- Enjoy
NB There is also a very limited edition of Southfields Abundance Apple Schnapps which added to hot mulled cider is unbelievably good but very quickly makes you want to lie down
To sign up to Abundance Southfields, to register your fruit tree, to become a volunteer fruit picker or cider maker or just so you know what we are up to go here .
