Marmalade: A saga

my sister and i decided to make marmalade because 1. my dad bought a bunch of oranges and 2. we watched Paddington yesterday. the youtube video we followed had 5 steps: chop oranges to small cubes, simmer, soak for 24 hrs, simmer again with sugar, profit.

Chop oranges with small cubes:

i cut them too thin, she cut them too thick. My other sister said she didn't wait to be apart of this when we inevitably burned the house down or something so she stood by the door saying "you look like that one meme with kendall jenner and the cucumber" the she stood right next to us and at random moments she said "hmmm" and going "i didnt say anything" when we ask whats wrong

simmer

my sisters too young to light a gas cooker and im too much of a coward(our gas cooker has to be lit manually with a matchstick or smth) so we used the electric one(my older sister said we took to long cutting so she left). problem is the electric one is slow so the oranges sat in lukewarm water for 30minutes or so until the simmering started. the kitchen smelled like tea, it was nice

soak for 24hours 2hrs

my sister was going to sleep over our cousins place tomorrow for a few days and i didnt want to watch over two 7 yr olds and since the recipe said the jam would last only two days, we decided to soak for 2hrs

simmer again with sugar

we waited for most of the water to evaporate like the recipe said but it was taking to long, my sister said that we should up the heat to 4 (the recipe said medium heat, and the electric cooker had notches(is that the word, notches?) from 0-6. we increased it to four but it as still taking too long so we got confident and took it up to 6. 6 worked well the water was down so we brought it to 4 and added the sugar.

the marmalade looked ok-ish in texture but the colour looked like chunky greenish yellow vomit because the oranges my dad brought stay green even when ripe and they lost colour in the 1st simmer. but that was ok because my  mom had food dye she used when cake decorating

BAD: she didnt have any orange dye

GOOD: she had two red dyes, tomato red and bright red

bad: they looked identical in their litte tins

good: we could do a sample with bowls of water

bad: my mom hasnt cake decorated in YEARS the dyes could be expired

bad: there was no expiration date on the tins

good? there was no expiration date on the tins

the water sample results declared bright red the most likely to become orangeish. so we added that and the result was an orange(yay) but fanta looking chunky vomit marmalade, it was like, almost neon, nothing like the beautiful almost glossy marmalade in the video

Presentation Fail

It WAS SO BITTERRRR. we thought the significantly shorter wait time would result in a sweeter marmalade but god we were wrong we thought about adding more sugar but the sun was down and we lost morale

Taste: fail

gonna add it to a cake tomorrow after school and see what happens