A fun afternoon making prickly pear jelly

My roommate just celebrated her birthday. She asked that my gift be to teach her how to can jelly and jams. I was happy to oblige.
By far the funniest part was gathering the fruit. We didn't have time to go out to the desert to gather, which is my preferred way to get the best fruit. So we had to settle with gathering in the city. We found a house a few blocks away that had a cactus covered in fruit. Imagine the woman's perspective, who has only been in arizona a month, as she answered the door. Here are two women telling her they make jelly from cactus fruit and wondering if we could pick some from her yard. She agreed since she doesn't know what to do with them; she probably thinks all arizonans are crazy now. In exchange we offered her a jar of the finished project. To keep our fingers from being covered in little spines we used kitchen tongs to pull them off.
We drove around a little more but really didn't find anymore good fruit so we headed home to juice what we gathered. You may wonder how you go about juicing something that has little spines on it and the inside looks like a pomegranite. I will say only two words: steam juicer. You just throw the fruit in there and let the steam do all the work for about an hour. Occasionally we had to smash them down with a potato masher to extract more juice but other than that we just let it work while we watched movies. From the fruit we gathered we had enough juice to make two batches of jelly.
Once we had the juice the rest is just like how you would make any other kind of jelly. My roommate loved learning the process, even though she did get some spines in her fingers (a good method for getting cactus spines out of you is to use elmers glue. Just spread it over the spot, let it dry and then pull off the glue like you did when a kid. Many times this will pull the spine out with the dried glue). Now my roommate wants to learn how to make jams starting with raspberry, yum.