A culinary experiment: juice and smoothie

Ok. Mandy always wants me to take pictures when I make things; and today I made some fruit drinks. One is basically a juice and the other is more like a smoothie. I just used what I had on hand so you can play with any ingredients you've got as well.

Oh and just a warning: I don't measure. That's why you'll see my cup in one of the pictures. I mixed juices into the cup until it tasted good, then used that to establish my ratio for the big bottle. I only remembered to take pictures after I'd already done half of it though, so a few steps will be missing but I'll explain them anyway.

Here is a list of the ingredients I used:


Volvic Juiced* - berry medley
Trederwen Essence* - lemon and lime flavor
Trederwen Essence* - forest fruits flavor
orange juice - you can use the pulpy kind or the smooth. I used the smooth because that's what I had.
1 large orange
elderberry jam - you could use any berry flavor here

Fairy Juice

Step One: You will need to mix the Berry Medley and Forest Fruits together in a ratio similar to what I've got marked here. This is a 1.5 litre bottle. It should be completely full even though mine isn't in this photo because I only thought to take pictures after I had already done step two. Oops. We'll call this mixture Berry Forest.

Step Two: Mix the Orange Juice, Berry Forest, and Lemon and Lime similar to mine. We'll call this result Fairy Juice.

You can stop here if you like. What you've got right now is a fruit juice that tastes a little tropical with its mix of sweet and tart flavors. It tastes even better when it's ice cold. (According to my taste testers, it's also apparently 'so good' when mixed with vodka lol). I took my juice and used it as a base for yet another experiment... a smoothie type drink. Let's call it......

Fairy Berry Smoothie

Step One: Put your Fairy Juice in a blender, again using my pictures as a guideline to the sort of ratios you'll be working with. 

Step Two: My elderberry jam was from my very first attempt at making jam. It turned out a little too watery so it basically had the consistency of a really thick syrup. To get your jam to the same consistency for the sake of ratios here, mix your jam with some boiling water (add a tiny amount of the water at a time and stir until it's mixed. this will melt the jam down. remember you want it to be like a thick syrup and not TOO watery. if it's a little too thick, that's ok.) In fact, you could probably even substitute this for those thick fruity syrups you can get for pancakes. Anyway, once you get your jam syrup stuff.. add it to the blender as well. The picture below turned out awesome because the two separated themselves into obvious rations for me as the jam sank to the bottom.

Step Three: Peel your orange and put the fruit into the blender. I don't have a picture of that. My fingers were too sticky and I was afraid to get the camera dirty.

Step Four: Blend. My blender has 4 settings - pulse, 0 (off basically), 1 and 2. I put my blender on 1 and let it blend for about 3 minutes because I got sidetracked by my cat. This was a good amount though because in the end, I had a smoothie that was thick enough to be really filling still but thin enough to drink from a straw.

Step Five: Put it in something. I stuck mine in two empty and cleaned mayo jars, then put those in the fridge. If you wanted to drink it right away, toss in a couple of handfuls of ice cubes and blend for another 2 minutes on 1 again, then pour into a glass and drink.

That's what mine looked like. You can see the layer of froth that formed at the top. The color in this photo really doesn't do the mixture justice. It actually came out more of a deep red-plum kind of color. This tasted great and was very filling. 

*If you don't have the Volvic and Trederwen Essences available to you, here's my thoughts on how you could make your own versions of them.
Volvic - 1) mix together these juices in the following ratio: 2 parts strawberry, 2 parts raspberry, 1 part black currant (or red grape could work here), 1 part blueberry. 2) mix the juice with the same amount of water to double its volume.
[example: 2 cups strawberry juice, 2 cups raspberry juice, 1 cup black currant juice, 1 cup blueberry juice, 6 cups of water]
Trederwen Lemon/Lime - 1) mix: 1 part lemon juice, 1 part lime juice, 1 part sugar (or honey to taste, the main point is to have it tasting a little more sweet than tart), 6 parts water
[example: 1 cup lemon juice, 1 cup lime juice, 1 cup sugar, 6 cups water]
Tredwerwen Forest Fruits - 1 part rasberry, 2 parts blackberry, 6 parts water
[example: half cup raspberry juice, 1 cup blackberry juice, 3 cups water]