Earlier in the year, I experimented with making fruit liqueur at home; I made a bottle of raspberry vodka with great success. Seeking to repeat the success and add some variety, I recently tried making apricot vodka (with the intent to have it ready for Christmas and the New Year). Unfortunately, I failed. It turns out that apricots don't have enough flavour in them to overcome the taste of vodka, and so I've ended up with pale yellow coloured bleach. I'm now attempting to rescue it by ramming it full of spices.

I realise it's a little late now for anybody who's interested in making this for Christmas, but if anyone fancies making it some other time, here's the (successful, at least in my opinion) recipe for raspberry vodka. It takes three weeks or more to do. A good recipe for apricot vodka is left as an exercise for the reader.

Ingredients

• 675g fresh raspberries
• ~1tbsp lemon juice
• 700ml vodka
• ~250g granulated sugar

Method

1. Slightly crush the raspberries and put them into a 1.5l plastic bottle (an empty water bottle is perfect) with the lemon juice and vodka. It's better to put the raspberries in first so that they don't splash.
2. Seal the bottle well and shake it.
3. Leave the bottle in a cool, dark place for around four weeks, shaking it every day. The precise amount of time you leave the mixture to infuse doesn't really matter, as long as it's more than about three weeks. Try to avoid opening the bottle during this time, as that'll introduce contaminants.
4. After the mixture has infused for a suitable amount of time, filter it out into another bottle. This might take a day or longer, depending on your filter paper. Use fine filter paper (coffee filter papers worked well for me), and be prepared to use several filter papers, as they will get clogged up. Keep the raspberries!
5. Once filtering is complete, add sugar to the filtered liquid to taste. 250g makes it fairly sweet, so you could quite easily use less. If you're not sure, add it gradually, since it only takes a few tens of minutes (and some shaking) to dissolve.
6. Drink and enjoy! The recipe produces just under 1l of raspberry vodka. The raspberries left over from filtration are excellent when eaten with cream or ice cream.

I can't take much credit for this, as it's based on a recipe I found here: http://www.guntheranderson.com/liqueurs/raspberr.htm. I made some alterations, though, such as doubling the ratio of raspberries to vodka. Fortunately, they seem to have worked out well.

In other news, libgdata's API documentation is now available on library.gnome.org! Thanks to Frédéric Péters for getting this sorted out.