Kumquat Brandy

I have an enormous kumquat tree in my back yard, which is absolutely laden with kumquats. Reportedly, according to the former owner of our house, it is the best kumquat tree in the district, and will fruit all year round. A couple of months ago, when it started to look like this might actually be the truth, I raced off to google to try to work out what the bloody hell I was going to do with the inevitable 12 tonnes of fruit. At the time, the options seemed to be kumquat marmalade, or kumquat brandy. Now, let's be honest, there's only so much kumquat marmalade the family can eat. So, I decided to have a crack at kumquat brandy.

The very simple recipe I found on the ABC website called for 500g kumquats, 500g sugar and a bottle of brandy. I decided to use a flagon I had sitting around, and double the recipe. The basic premise seemed to be shove kumquats into flagon, add sugar, brandy and shake. Things, of course, are never that simple.

The kumquats all had to have their skin pricked with a darning needle, or similar. In my house, that "similar" would be a fondue fork. So there I am, spraying kumquat juice right left and centre, pricking kumquat skin. That, it turned out, would be the easy part. With the exception of the very smallest, actually getting the kumquats through the narrower-than-I-thought neck of the flagon proved to be a bit of a problem. Nothing a bit of brute force wouldn't see to, but it took me a lot longer than I expected, given that I had to cram every little fruit through the neck of the flagon individually. But success was finally mine. Onto the next step. Inserting the kilo of sugar into the flagon would've been much easier if I could've only found my funnel. But no. I first thought of a sort of impromtu funnel made out of kitchen roll, which would've worked had not the flagon been covered in kumquat juice, as what I ended up with was a sticky mess. Writing this a few months after the fact, I honestly do not remember how I managed to get the sugar in, but I suspect there was plenty of swearing involved. Follow the sugar with two bottles of cheap brandy (not that cheap brandy is all that cheap, as I found out), and voila!

The flagon required "shaking", or in actual fact wiggling around a bit, for the first month or so while the sugar dissolved, and then every now and then after that. In practice, it sits on the bar in the dining room, and I give it a swish around every time I walk past it. The brandy will be ready to drink approximately six months after the sugar and kumquats are added, which in this case will be around the middle of September. Stay tuned.

Since I last went looking for kumquat recipes, this site has appeared in my google results. While I'm not sure about some of them, there appears to be some good recipes for sauces and bikkies and thing on there.