Foraged or Home Grown Fruit Cheeses

It's a fruity time of year, with plums, blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, pears and peaches all coming into ripeness.
   I'm not keen on endlessly fishing pips and stones out of the jam pan, or eating jams with thousands of little seeds and pips in so tend to make lots of jellies instead, though the remaining pulp always leaves lots of guilt for not using natures bounty to its fullest.
  Cheeses are a lovely way to use up the majority of the left over pulp and are ideal for using up over ripe plums that will spoil the setting of jam. A fruit cheese is a solid jelly like mass that can be sliced and eaten with cheese, sliced and eaten on it's own on biscuits, poured into shaped moulds and drenched in icing sugar and eaten as a sweety, sliced into little cubes and drenched in chocolate.....anyway, onto the recipe

Fruit Cheese

Place ripe fruit into a slow cooker with some water (or a large thick bottomed pan on a lowish heat, still adding the water)

Cook slowly until the fruit is mushy.

If you are making jelly place all the pulp into a jelly bag and allow to drip overnight....make jelly with the liquid.

For the cheese take the pulp left in the jelly bag(or all the pulp if you didn't make jelly) and rub it through a sieve into a thick bottomed pan. The skins and pips will be left to put into the compost.

Add honey or sugar to taste and heat slowly, while stirring, till all the sugar is dissolved.

Now simmer away slowly, stirring occasionally so it doesn't stick to the bottom of pan, until it's thickened so much you can see the bottom of the pan easily when you scrape through it with a wooden spoon.

Pour into:
A) containers that have been lined with greaseproof paper and allow to cool before turning out.
B) jars, then seal with a lid or cellophane circles made for jam making, these should be clearly labeled and will keep for up to a year
C) flexible moulds, something like silicone chocolate moulds, allow to cool before turning them out.