Rumtopf

While I'm busy making jams and pickles you can bet my cocktail obsessed husband is busy preserving fruit in booze. So far he's preserved mostly cherries (in either Maraschino, Metaxa, or Brandy) that will be used to garnish our cocktails. But this beauty was both of our handiwork.

Usually fruit preserved in alcohol takes on the flavour of the booze, while adding some fruit flavour to the alcohol, creating fruit that is deliciously intoxicating to snack on as well as some fabulously flavoured booze to sip on.  But in the case of Rumtopf the flavour is taken to the next level. We tasted a cherry that tasted like strawberries, rum, blueberries, and raspberries! It was so fantastic we can't wait to make many many more bottles.

I had first read about Rumtopf in one of my favourite preserving books, but after a friend told me he had made some I just knew I had to try it too.

Fill a clean 1 litre mason jar with fresh, clean summer fruit of your choice (blackberries, raspberries, strawberries, cherries, red currants, blueberries, peaches, apricots, and plums will all work well). Add 1 cup of white sugar and fill jar with rum. Shake well to dissolve sugar and store in a cool dry place.
Let sit for a least a week before diving in. Eat fruit whenever you want, and replace with more fruit that has come into season.*

*Truthfully by the time we got around to making this most of the fruit we wanted to use was all in season so we just threw it all in there at once. But next year I think it will be really fun to start a bottle in June when the strawberries first arrive and to continue to add to it over the whole summer.