Rhubarb and ginger jam

I'm in Australia at the moment - but I have a few posts scheduled while I figure out the nitty gritty of getting pictures onto my laptop etc. So there may be some irregularity in posting for the next while but at the moment I don't know!

After I made the lovely crystallised ginger, I was wondering what else I could do with it. I realised that I hadn't had any rhubarb yet this year, so I decided to make rhubarb and ginger jam.

I used this recipe, but as I had only 750g rhubarb I didn't make a full quantity. And I used 700g sugar because I prefer a slightly less-sweet jam. I got a very firm set after 12 minutes cooking, and it has a really delicious, firey and tangy flavour.

Of course, having made 4 pots of jam I then needed to decide what to do with that. Other than eat it on toast, which of course I did.

One pot of jam I swapped for a lovely loaf of banana nut bread, through the delicious. magazine food swap group on Facebook. You haven't lived until you've sidled up to a stranger at Kings Cross station and said "You after some jam?".

I also made some jam thumbprint cookies. These were a bit of a gamble, because I thawed out some cookie dough from the freezer but couldn't actually remember what kind of cookies it was. One day I will start labelling food for the freezer more accurately, but today is not that day. When the cookies baked to an odd glossy sheen I realised that it must have been cream cheese snickerdoodle dough. The slight tang of the cream cheese went very nicely with the jam.

And I made a not-100%-successful Charlotte Russe. I dunked savoiardi biscuits in Pedro Ximenez sherry and used them to line the edges of a 6" springform tin. Then I made a buttermilk bavarois mixture, flavouring 2/3 of it with vanilla and rosewater and 1/3 with the rhubarb jam. I layered it and let it set and then topped it with more jam. The flavours were excellent, but I buggered up the proportions of gelatine in the bavarois so it was a little too firmly set and a bit rubbery. There also wasn't enough cream to biscuit, so it was a touch on the dry side.

Still - the concept was good and I have enough biscuits and enough jam to have another go.