Wednesday morning tea day, the usual wondering which treat I should make.

An old fashioned favourite made the cut – jelly cakes, but with a twist.

In summer I was given a large number of plums. They were ruby red, both flesh and skin and quite large.

“Blood plums.” I thought. They preserve beautifully so I went ahead and bottled the lot (yielding at least 2 dozen jars full).

When we tasted them a few days later – oh dear! So, so sour. They hadn’t been blood plums after all, but large cherry plums.

Most cherry plums are very sour once preserved, skin and flesh both, even with a heavy sugar syrup, and I had only used a light one.

They’ve been sitting in the pantry ever since, poor maligned things.

However today they came into their own. I drained off the syrup (adding a tiny bit of sugar, not much), heated it with gelatine.

Once cooled I used this as the jelly to coat the cakes. It made them so tasty, far more than using jelly crystals.

All this because I like to always include an element of fruit in the Wednesday morning tea.

Afterwards, and with a friend coming for dinner, I removed the pips from the plums, pureed them, and made a jelly by heating and adding gelatine and, as before, cooling.

I had a chilled tin of evaporated milk in the fridge, so I whipped that up till thick, then beat in the cooled plum puree jelly.

It worked a treat – the resulting flummery is the most delicious I’ve tasted, even better than raspberry or apricot. The acidity of the plums is almost like a creamy sherbet.

Once set in little dishes, these were topped with the jelly liquid left over from coating the jelly cakes.

What did I learn from all of this? Taste plums before I bottle them.

Put things aside for a bit, have a little think and eventually work out something to do with them.