Making estate-grown, hand-made prickly pear syrup!
First, harvest your crop. We had a couple of pounds of "tunas" (fruits) on prickly pears around the house. Be very careful picking these as they have sharp spines and worse, glochids, very small hooked spines that embed themselves in your skin and can't be easily removed. The glochids are the little dots on the fruits. I used tongs to pick the fruit.
Next, cut the fruit into pieces to make it easier to mash and release the juice.
Mash the fruit to break it up and release some of the juice.
Then dump the mashed fruit and juice into a food mill to extract all of the juice.
Run the resulting juice through a paper towel-lined sieve. This is a key step to remove all the spines and glochids. I do this several times to make sure the juice does not contain anything other the pure fluid.
The result: pure prickly pear juice! One pound of fruit equals about a cup of juice.
Put the juice in a pan with an equal volume of sugar and simmer for 5 minutes.
Add a tiny amount of citric acid to provide better flavour balance.
And voila, prickly pear syrup!