• Cake, pie, sorbet, ice cream, and cupcake toppers.
• Bag them up and give as gifts.
• Add to summer drinks.
• Decoration for dishes or around a holiday table.
• To teach kids about edible flowers.
• You can use super tiny bags and turn them into gift tags on presents. I’m not a fan of the plastic use here, but it looks fabulous.
• Add them to easter baskets.
• Wedding favors.

Plus they taste great. I made candied flowers for the first time when I was about 10 years old – candied lilacs actually and I’ve been in love with edible flowers ever since.

There are many recipes out there for candied, or crystallized flowers but the basic gist of most is simply that you’re going to be coating them with a sugar mixture.

Good flowers to sugar coat: Lilacs, violets, rose petals, cowslip, angelica, rosemary, sage, pinks, borage, primroses, and lavender. You can also coat leaves like lemon balm, lemon verbena, mint, and bergmot.

No matter what flowers you use, they always need to be home grown organic, or purchased from a reliable organic source. Flowers drink up and store pesticides easily, you don’t need that in your system.

To crystallize flowers and leaves:

1. Pick flowers on a sunny dry day.
2. Remove stalks and white bases from petals, also remove any petals that look funky from your pile, because the sugaring makes problems stand out.
3. Lightly beat an egg white until just foamy.
4. Dip each flower into the egg white to coat. You can use plastic tweezers (metal will bruise petals).
5. Dip into caster sugar.
6. Place on wax paper atop a wire cooling rack.
7. Place in your extremely low heated oven with the door slightly open – I tried open air solar flowers once, but forgot that little flowers will just blow away. Don’t do it. I suppose you could place your flowers in an enclosed solar oven, but you’d have to make sure you could maintain low heat, and solar cookers tend to get super hot.
8. Once they dry in the oven, store in an airtight container. I’m not sure how long you can keep them, they’re never around long enough for me to find out – people love them.

There are other same-minded, but slightly different recipes around:

Create delicious candied flowers

A Spring Trifle – with candied lilacs

Orange Blossom Cake with Candied Orchids

Take Time to Stop and Eat the Flowers

Edible Flowers: Cook, Grow, Buy – a truly excellent read.

Post from: Tree Hugging Family

Some basics:

Technically, lilacs started out as a bush, more so than a tree. In past years, the lilac bush was bred into the lilac tree. Lilacs fare better where winters are cold and in well drained soil. They leaf early and drop late. One of the best things about the lilac bush is that it can be used as a living fence. You can also plant lilac trees close in to a house, and even in a container. There are so many types of lilacs the choices are staggering. I like the good old light violet colored or blue-violet lilacs, but there’s also white, red-violet, pink, yellow, and dark purple varieties available.

The downside is that lilacs need upkeep. You need to prune them every few years, although yearly is best; remove weak growth, and clip off the seeds when the bloom is over for best health and look of the plant. This is not too bad if you keep up on it.

Awesome lilac uses:

One of my favorite things to do with lilacs use them in salads or candy them. They look amazing on cakes or cupcakes and taste great. You can also make lilac wine, lilac sorbet, or use them in homemade beauty products. You can even simply add them to your bath for fragrance.

To learn more visit the amazing world of lilacs at the beautiful International Lilac Site.

Post from: Tree Hugging Family