It turns out that stuffing my failure of an apricot liqueur full of spices has worked, and I now have a bottle of tasty festive spicy apricot vodka. Here's the recipe in full:

Ingredients

• 300g dried apricots
• 700ml vodka
• 1 large cinnamon stick
• Rind of 1 orange
• 2 blades mace
• 4 cloves
• 8 juniper berries
• ~200g granulated sugar

Method

1. Submerge the dried apricots in boiling water and leave them overnight to re-inflate. I had to do this because I could only buy dried apricots, but I guess an equivalent mass of fresh apricots would work.
2. Split the apricots into halves and put them into a 1.5l plastic bottle (an empty water bottle is perfect) with a cinnamon stick and the vodka. It's better to put the apricots in first so that they don't splash.
3. Seal the bottle well and shake it.
4. 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.
5. 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 apricots!
6. Once filtering is complete, add sugar to the filtered liquid to taste. 200g should be about right (I used 225g this time, and it was a little too sweet). Add the cinnamon stick again (or use a fresh one), and the orange rind, mace blades, cloves and juniper berries. Seal the bottle up again and leave it for at least another two weeks, shaking it daily.
7. After at least two weeks, filter it again. This should take a lot less time, as most of the fine sediment will have been removed during the first filtration.
8. Drink and enjoy! The recipe produces about 700ml of spiced apricot vodka. The apricots left over from filtration are nice in a pie, though they will have lost a lot of their flavour (more so than the raspberries).

I'm sure it would be quite possible to infuse the vodka with the apricots and spices at the same time, but I didn't try this, so I can't be sure. Another thing I probably should've done is added the sugar after infusing the vodka with the spices, as that would've allowed it to be added to taste. As it was, I added what I guessed was the right amount and fortunately it turned out well.

While not busy playing around with drinks, I've got around to finishing off and releasing libgdata 0.8.0. This vastly improves upload and downloads via streaming I/O, as well as fixing a lot of race conditions, leaks and cancellation problems. This release doesn't introduce much new functionality, but breaks a lot of API, hopefully for the better.

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.