Homemade Apple Cider

When autumn rolls around you will never see me running to Starbucks to grab one of their pumpkin spice lattes. I think they are gross. I fail to understand how people enjoy such a drink. I mean, I enjoy pumpkin. I love pumpkin cake, pumpkin pie, pumpkin bread but pumpkin in liquid form is disgusting to me. 

My autumn drink of choice is apple cider. I get super excited whenever I go into Walmart and see the displays of apple cider jugs. One year, I bought an embarrassing amount of the hot apple cider drink mix during the fall because I could never find it the rest of the year. I love apple cider so much in fact that we had sparkling apple cider at our wedding for the wedding toast. 

Now, this is the part where I am really lucky to have Creed. He is more skilled in the kitchen than I am when it comes to cooking. So, he made apple cider at home in our crockpot so we could have some homemade.  He also remembered that I was starting this blog so he had our friend Madison take pictures. 

Ingredients

10 Red Delicious Apples

4 clementines

whole cloves

4 cinnamon sticks
sugar
maple syrup
cheesecloth

After washing off all the apples, core the apples and then cut them into slices. Place all of these into the crock-pot. Slice the top and the bottom off of the clementines and place cloves in the sections. Place a cinnamon stick through the center. 

A photo posted by Happily Ever After in a Jeep (@happilyeverafterinajeep) on Dec 11, 2015 at 3:00pm PST

Place all the clementine slices, including the top and bottom slices, into the crockpot on top of the apples. Fill the crockpot with water and set on low heat overnight. The next morning, mash the apples and clementines in the crockpot. 

Now, get a large container and secure of a piece of cheesecloth over it with a rubber band. Very carefully scoop spoonfuls of the apples and clementines onto the cheesecloth.  Press lightly to squeeze out the juices. You don't want to press too hard because then pulp will fall into the container. Scrape off each batch of pulp once you've gotten most of the juice out. Continue this process until you have strained all of the pulp. Pour any leftover juice in the crockpot through the cheesecloth. 

At this point, taste the apple cider. Whenever we made it we didn't need to add any sugar or maple syrup to make it sweeter. However, you can add either to make the cider more suitable to your tastes. 

Creedence drinking the fresh homemade apple cider we made. 

A photo posted by Happily Ever After in a Jeep (@happilyeverafterinajeep) on Dec 11, 2015 at 7:23pm PST

And ta-da! Fresh homemade apple cider for everyone to enjoy!