Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Apple Canned Goodies and Spiders

When I left off yesterday, I had chopped up a bunch of apples in my crockpot, added 2 Tablespoons of (imitation) Vanilla extract and let them cook on Low for 6 hours.

At hour 6, I added 1½ cup of brown sugar, 1 teaspoon ground cloves, and 3-4 teaspoons of ground cinnamon, stirred it good and went to bed.

This morning I awoke to yu-u-u-u-myness. Ohmigah it smelled soooo gooood.


Jarred up looking pretty with the free printable labels.


Even after the apple butter, I still had some more apples I needed to do something with. I decided to make Apple Pie Jam.

I forgot to get pictures, but I peeled, cored, and diced the remainder of apples, which ended up being 14 cups (I measured this time).

Ingredients:
4 cups diced apples
2 tablespoons lemon juice {I used bottled}
1 1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 box pectin
4 cups granulated sugar
1 cup firmly packed brown sugar

The recipe called for 4 cups of apples, I had 14, so I doubled the amount of lemon juice, cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg, and used 1½ box of Pectin. I didn't double the sugar because it seemed like a lot to start with. I think my apple jelly might have ended up tasting more like sugar than apple - I'm not a jelly eater, so I don't know if it's supposed to be that sweet - but anyway I didn't want to make these too overly sweet.


I added about a cup of water, the lemon juice, spices, and Pectin and brought to a rolling boil. Then I added the sugar(s) and returned to - possibly - a rolling boil, and boiled - possibly - for 1 minute.

The directions says when it boils and you can't stir it down, and it seemed like it was doing that so I set the timer for 1 minute, but then it seemed like I was able to stir it down, I wasn't sure so I let it go a little bit longer than the 1 minute.

So hopefully this jels up right, and tastes good. Supposedly when you eat it on toast or a biscuit it's supposed to be like you're eating apple pie.


I had ran out of canning jar lids and had to go to Walmart to get some more. While I was there I went over to the craft department to look for some acrylic craft paint, and I was looking around at the other offerings and saw a pack of peel'n'stick magnet strips for 97¢.


If you remember awhile back I had started a Halloween project making magnetic Spiders and the advertising magnets I was using wasn't strong enough. These felt more heavy-duty in the package, and they didn't cost too much, so I decided to give them a try.

It takes a bit more squeeze-y, but I'm still able to punch circles out of the magnet with my hole-puncher.


They are peel'n'stick but the stick part isn't really sticky enough, and some (most) of the spiders don't have perfectly flat bottoms where I cut the ring part off, so I'm still going to have to hot glue them. Oh joy.


This was sticking to my crockpot real good at first. The magnet stuck fine, but eventually it let the spider go from the sticky part and it fell off.


There are 18 magnetic strips in the package, but I was able to punch 39 holes out of 1 strip. I only need 50 (or less...Ryan took one or some to work to scare his arachnaphobic co-workers, lol), so I'll only be using about 1½ strips. The price works out to about 5¢ a strip, so with the spiders (50/$1.00) this project works out to about $2.00/50'ish spiders, or about 4¢ per spider.

I was thinking about maybe combining the little spiders with this one, in the corner of my carport next to/above the door, with all the tiny magnetic spiders "running" across the door. That ought to keep unwanted guests away, mwahahahaha.



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