Canning – Cranberry Jelly

I don’t know about you but I’m finding it hard to believe that it’s Christmas week already. Tomorrow we will celebrate with part of our family, then on Christmas Eve day the rest of the crew arrives to spend Christmas with us. It’s a special year, and the first time in seven years that we will be blessed to spend time with some–let alone all!–of our kids with us over the holiday.

A couple of weeks ago when the fresh cranberries arrived at the supermarket I got busy and made some cranberry jelly. As part of my ongoing quest to stop purchasing store-bought canned goods this was one more thing to cross off the list. Yes, I know that the canned jelly is not to everyone’s taste but in my house it’s gotta be jelly–no whole berries allowed!

This recipe is from the classic  Ball Blue Book of Preserving. I made two batches which yielded four pints of jelly–more than enough to get us through the coming year. By the way, I’ve added the following handy-dandy widget that will allow you to print the recipes I post. I’ll be going back to previous recipe posts and updating it to include a printable recipe as well.

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Here’s some information, with photos, about how to test for the gelling point.

UPDATE December 29, 2014

We enjoyed this on Christmas Day immensely and, by the way, it did come out of the jar just as expected! My granddaughter, especially, deemed the recipe a huge success!