A foray into the world of business…

Lemon and Grapefruit Jellies

Clearly, I don’t have the commercial mind, because I’ve just spent ten minutes drafting and re-drafting the beginning of this post and deleting everything again.

So maybe I should just cut to the chase.

I’m trying to earn a little Christmas pocket money, and as it happens, I make rather excellent vegan fruit jellies (I’m still working on the vegan marshmallows). I thought I’d have a go at selling some of them on a very low key basis (it has to be low key, because I do not have a commercial, council-approved kitchen, which means no selling through shops).

My jellies are made from sugar, glucose (derived from corn), citrus pectin, citric acid and fruit zest, juice, and pulp. In the case of everything except the pomegranate and apple jellies, they are in fact made from fresh fruit (I buy a good-quality commercial apple juice and a pomegranate juice for the others). They do not contain any added colours or flavours, and they are vegan and cruelty free (all my laboratory testing has been performed on volunteer scientists). They are also gluten-free and nut-free, though my kitchen is regularly used to prepare foods containing nuts, gluten, dairy, etc, so if you need to watch your allergies to that extent, I’m afraid they may not be suitable (obviously, everything I’m actually preparing the jellies in has been through the dishwasher or the sink with lots of hot water and soap, but I can’t guarantee that there are absolutely no trace elements of allergens floating around).

Most importantly, they are completely delicious, and make excellent Christmas presents!

I intend to sell them in little packets of 12 for $10, with three flavours in each packet, though I could be persuaded to create other assortments. The flavours will be:

Citrus: Lemon, Pink Grapefruit, Blood Orange (these are really special, because I got the absolute last blood oranges of the season, so you’ll need to be quick if you want them)

Christmas Spice: Grapefruit & Ginger, Orange & Nutmeg, Toffee Apple / Apple and Cinnamon (depending how I feel)

Middle Eastern Inspirations: Pomegranate, Lemon & Rosewater, Orange & Orange Flower Water

Luxury Fruit: Raspberry, Passionfruit, Lime (I made these last night – they are new recipes I’ve created and the passionfruit is particularly amazing.  The raspberry tastes like the best raspberry jam you ever ate, in jelly form.  However, they may work out to be $12 per packet, because they are much more expensive to make and  because getting juice out of passionfruit is an absolute nuisance!)

If you think you might be interested in purchasing confectionery, please comment below. I’m afraid I’m only doing this within Australia for now – possibly only within Melbourne, but we’ll see how things go. At this point, I’m really looking at expressions of interest, to get an idea of how many batches I should be making, and whether it’s worth the attempt, but I’m really hoping to do this.