Intense Natural Flavours with Homemade Berry Syrup
– When making for instance a strawberry or raspberry flavoured frosting – like the buttercream frosting for my raspberry slice cupcakes – I like to use a homemade berry syrup to add flavour instead of aroma or jam. That way I know exactly what’s in my frosting, avoiding chemicals and artificial substances while getting a lovely natural and intense flavour
For this recipe I have sligthly modified a recipe for wild berry syrup from the famous Danish online cookbook Karolines Køkken. You can use whatever berries you like; but when choosing berries with seeds such as raspberries you may want to strain your syrup. Use a spoon to gently push the syrup back and forth in a fine mesh strainer and repeat 2-3 times to get rid of as many seeds as possible so that they don’t add unwanted bitterness and spoil the lovely smoothness of your frosting
Recipe
- 1/2 vanilla pod
- 200 g frozen berries of your choice
- 50 g sugar
- 2 tbsp water
- Cut the vanilla pod in half, open it with a knife and scrape out the seeds. On the chopping board carefully mix the seeds with a little sugar, pushing and pressing the mixture back and forth with the tip of the knife until the seeds are separated and well mixed with the sugar.
- Combine berries, water, sugar, vanilla seeds and the empty half of the vanilla pod in a small saucepan, put the lid on and set over low heat. Allow to boil for about 5 minutes. Take of the lid and boil down the mixture over high heat, stirring occasionally, until you have about 3/4 cup left.
- In case you still have large pieces of berry in your mixture – usually you shouldn’t, byt strawberries can be persistent – use a hand mixer to smooth the mixture out. If needed, strain your syrup to get rid of seeds.
- Keep in the fridge in an airtight, sterilized container – I use a washed and boiled jam jar – and my experience is that it will keep for 2-4 weeks.