Ho Ho Ho-me made Grand Marnier

Hi Wafflers. This weekend has been all about the second stage of the Grand Marnier making.

You may remember a month ago I started this project and the jar has been sitting in the bottom of my wardrobe, with me shaking it around a bit from time to time. This is how it looked like when I retrieved it from the wardrobe.

Firstly I had to strain out all the orange peel, like this.

This left the liquid.

A sugar and water syrup was then made, cooled and added.

Then the amalgamated mixture had to be strained through coffee filter paper. The recipe said to do this 3 or 4 times. Honestly this was taking so long, I only did it twice.

I then poured it into glass jars which I had sterilised by washing in warm soapy water, rinsing well and drying in the oven for 11 minutes at 120 degrees C fan oven. I am well impressed with the end result. It is a delicious, sweet and alcoholic, deep golden orangey nectar. Cheers! 🙂 If you want the recipe for the Grand Marnier you can find it here, but bear in mind it won’t be ready for Christmas 2020 now as it takes 4 weeks in the wardrobe stage. It keeps for up to a year in the fridge.

I also love the little glasses I bought from Amazon for this, they are so cute. They were £11.99 for a pack of 6. You can buy them here. They would make a great gift for someone. They are actually called sherry glasses but would work for any kind of liqueur.

I would only ever drink liqueurs at Christmas time, and probably not that many. I’m planning on cooking with the Grand Marnier, so I’m going to make some Grand Marnier chocolate truffles, and maybe also some seafood such as prawns cooked in Grand Marnier, and maybe a Grand Marnier soufflé, if I have time. Exciting stuff. I will probably gift a bottle or two too.

So it seems I have found my Christmas spirit, ha ha ha 😂. I have ordered some gifts online and written all my cards now, get me! I’ve got a home made Christmas cake waiting in a tin and a pudding in the cupboard. Feeling all set… well nearly… still quite a lot of shopping, wrapping, posting and delivering to do, decorating the house and getting a tree, but all good. The things they show you in Christmas magazines to make have usually annoyed me in the past as I haven’t had time to make them. This year no problemo! The pandemic has given us all more cooking time and a bit of calm in the run up to Christmas and I’m not complaining about that.

On tonight’s menu is lamb shanks, roast potatoes, veg to be decided, gravy and mint sauce. I have prepared the lamb shanks as recommended by M & S. Firstly I coated the lamb shanks in seasoned flour nb vegetarians should probably look away now, this is quite gruesome!

Then browned them in a pan with some oil

Then put them into a dish with 500 ml stock – in my case made from a reduced salt Oxo cube – and foil over the top. Then into the fan oven at 140 degrees C for 2 hours. I’ll let you know Tuesday how they turned out…. watch this space!

This weekend was about brewing and cooking and Christmas prep, but it was also about the glorious sky and clouds and trees. I think I must have scored a personal best in the middle aged woman taking numbers of photos of sky and trees competition. I will edit and show you next time. Here’s one for you to be going along with. Keep safe and have a good week Xx.