Glacé kiwifruit

Wil and Nic brought a bunch of fruit when they came to stay, including three kiwifruit I didn't know what to do with. I didn't feel like just eating them, yummy though they are, so I had a go at making glacé kiwifruit, and I'll be doing it again in much larger quantities.

It's a reasonably long process, but doesn't require much actual work. First you peel and slice the fruit, then you parboil it and soak it in increasingly sugary syrup over several days, then you dry it.

This is my little batch in the oven at 50°C:


And here it is all finished:


It didn't last long, I couldn't stop nibbling until it was all gone. So much nicer than the crystallised stuff you get in the supermarket.

Recipe

Crystallised fruit

Ingredients
fruit
sugar (make sure you have plenty)

Method
Prepare fruit by peeling things like kiwifruit and stoning things like plums and cherries. Basically get it ready for eating.
Cut into bite-sized pieces, if slicing don't slice too thinly. About 1 cm is right. Leave small things like cherries whole.
Put in a pot and just cover with water. Bring to boiling point and simmer until the fruit is about half cooked. With kiwifruit this is about a minute!
Remove the fruit from the pot and put it in a non-reactive bowl. I used a small pyrex dish with a lid.
Return the cooking water to the pot and add 200g of sugar to each cup and a quarter of cooking water (henceforth all amounts are relative to this). Dissolve, bring to the boil, and pour over the fruit. Cover it.
* Next day drain the juice back into a pot and add 50 g sugar, dissolve, bring to the boil, pour back over fruit.
Repeat from * daily for five days.
Drain fruit, reserving thick syrup to use as an ice-cream topping or suchlike.
Place fruit on a wire rack and leave to dry in either a sunny spot or a very low (50°C) oven.