This Adventure is Brought to You by the Letter K: Wildly Experimental Orange Jelly

I have this fantastic orange tree in my back yard. It produces tons of tiny oranges year round. Literally, ALL YEAR ROUND. There is never a time that I've seen this tree without ripe oranges. Here's the problem though: they're incredibly sour. So sour that I had almost given up trying to use them for anything other than cleaning products and potpourri.
But I decided to redouble my efforts.

At the start, I had the best intentions of starting out by following the recipe exactly. That's generally a good way to go when you are trying something new, yes?

So I found this recipe. It's from a fantastic blog calls Food In Jars. How could I go wrong? Hah. Well, for starters, I didn't have liquid pectin. I had powdered. Internet to the rescue! Now that I had that substitution down (4 T powdered pectin + 3 oz hot water instead of a packet of liquid), I proceeded.

Well, I didn't want to make a whole bunch if it wasn't good, so I decided to halve the recipe.
Recipe says: 5 cups OJ, 5 cups sugar, 2 packs liquid pectin.
Instead, I would do 2.5 cups OJ, 2.5 cups sugar, 3 oz now-liquidy powdered pectin.

I juiced about 70 little oranges (since I pruned the tree and was gonna throw them out, which would be sad.) Now I had 2.5 C. fresh squeezed orange juice.

But wait! Turns out I don't have 2.5 cups sugar!
OK, we'll try 2.5 cups OJ, 2 cups sugar, 0.5 cup honey (probably... I eyeballed it because I hate measuring honey), and the dissolved pectin powder. So far so good, yes?

Now for the preparation. I dutifully poured the 2.5 C. fresh squeezed orange juice into the sauce pan and added the sugar and honey. I brought them to a boil. I was all set to use my candy thermometer to follow the instructions that it says are super important, about getting the mixture "greatly reduced" and up to 220 degrees. Then I

realized that there was a crack in my candy thermometer. When did that happen? Rats. OK, so I'll use a meat thermometer. But that only goes up to 180 degrees. I guess I'll eye-ball it. The arrow kept going to what I assumed was 220, and the amount of liquid did seem to be getting smaller. I don't know how much is "greatly" reduced, but it did boil out about 12 oz. of liquid.
I added the pectin and boiled another 5 minutes. Watch carefully! Oh, so much boiling over! (If you are not vigilant.)

OK, so not actually a water bath canner, but my largest pot with a
veggie steamer in the bottom of it.

Now for the jars. Of course you want to follow careful canning procedure here. I had been boiling the jars in my big old water-bath canner. I picked 3 12-oz jars, since that's how much 5 cups fits into.
I gently simmered the lids in a small pan of water, and made sure the bands were clean.

I added the boiling liquid to the hot jars (ended up filling only two of them perfectly), placed lids, tightened bands, and put them back in the canner for 5 minutes. After that, I pulled them out and the lids immediately popped. At least that part was right.

This turned out beautifully. It's still pretty tart, but if you are into that sort of thing, it's wonderful. We used it on Ritz crackers for Tea Party Tuesday. (An office tradition we follow to keep up morale on mid-week-slump days. Not to be confused with Tea Party Again Wednesday, which is when we have leftover cookies from Tuesday.)