Homemade Plum Fruit Leather

The other day when I wrote about our plum bonanza and all the different ways we've used up the hundreds of plums we picked, I forgot about fruit leather. The kids don't love it because it's not overly sweet, but Karl and I think it's pretty good.

Here's what I did:

I pitted and coarsely chopped about 4 cups of purple plums and put them in a sauce pan with about 3/4 cup of water and about 3/4 cup of honey. We had just harvested honey so instead of adding sugar, I used last year's honey in an effort to really start using it up. I cooked the plums at a simmer until they were really soft, about 15 minutes. I then poured the plums, in small batches, into a food processor and blended until the mixture was a thick puree.

After laying a Silpat baking sheet on a large jelly roll pan, I poured the plum puree into the pan and tried to get it as even a layer as a could. The first time I made fruit leather, I thought the mixture would seep under the edge of the Silpat and be a big mess, but I guess because the mixture is so thick and the mat is sticky, that just doesn't happen. After the mixture is fairly evenly spread, bake the leather in the oven at the lowest temperature at which your oven can be set for several hours (180 degrees is what our oven does) until it's dry to the touch. The fruit leather peels off the Silpat easily and then can be laid on a plastic wrap and rolled up.