Blood Orange and Blossom Cordial

This recipe is modified from Fouad Mum's recipe he posted on The Food Blog. Although I didn't have real orange blossoms to work with, in my first attempt I tried this with hand squeezed oranges. The next time round, I decided to snazz it up even more and used blood oranges to get the beautiful red colour. Here's the recipe:

4 cups of blood orange juice (you'll need somewhere between 3 to 3.5 kg of oranges)
8 cups of boiling water
2 tsp orange blossom water
1.5 kg of sugar (and even a little more might not go astray!)
1 tsp citric acid
The rind of 4 lemons plus their juice

Dissolve the sugar in the boiling water and keep boiling for another 5-10 minutes with the lemon rind and then let it steep for a further 5 minutes. Let it cool a bit so you don't cook the orange juice so you might as well juice the oranges in the meantime.

Juice the oranges to make at least 4 cups. I double-strained the juice through a fine sieve to remove most of the orange bits. No point wasting the lemons so juice those and add that in as well.

Add the blood orange juice, lemon juice and citric acid to the sugar mix and stir well. Finally, add the orange blossom water. You'll find the orange blossom water contains a lot of oils so it floats and doesn't mix too well so you need to be aware of this otherwise the first bottle of cordial will have much more orange blossom water in it that the last bottle.

I sterilised the bottles in the oven by placing them in a cool oven, bringing the heat up to 160C and left it there for 5 minutes before turning off the heat and letting the bottles cool. The bottle tops were sterilise separately by boiling them in water for 10 minutes.

I found that the cordial needed to be added at a ratio of about 1 to 4 (or even 3) with water as it is not anywhere as sweet as store bought cordials. It's good with lots of ice.

Some things to try next time are: use mandarins or tangelos instead of oranges, maybe try pureed and then strained mangoes or strawberries when they are in season, oh, and what about blood plums. The possibilities are endless!