Candied flowers are one of my favorite things ever. You can use them for so many things:
- 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:
- Pick flowers on a sunny dry day.
- Remove stalks and white bases from petals, also remove any petals that look funky from your pile, because the sugaring makes problems stand out.
- Lightly beat an egg white until just foamy.
- Dip each flower into the egg white to coat. You can use plastic tweezers (metal will bruise petals).
- Dip into caster sugar.
- Place on wax paper atop a wire cooling rack.
- 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.
- 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.
[...] an organic cake flavor like lavender or raspberry, and decorate cakes or salads with pretty little candied lilacs or other edible [...]
[...] The real reason I want to grow sweet violet is for edibles. I LOVE making candied lilacs but have never made candied, or crystallized violets, and I’ve heard they’re better [...]
[...] a homemade cake with candied flowers or fresh flowers from your garden as the decorations and serve punch with an ice ring full of [...]
Wait, are they… edible?
What if the flower that you want to crystallized is poisionous?
I didn’t even know that you could eat flowers.
But, It does look really pretty :]
[...] Candied Flowers from Jennifer at Tree Hugging Family [...]
[...] 15. Candied Flowers [...]
[...] at Tree Hugging Family posted these awesome instructions for making candied flowers. She also posted a review of one of my favorite cookbooks, here, and a link to a recipe from [...]
[...] Glaze: Combine the powdered sugar and remaining ingredients. Spread on the warm cake. Cool in pan. To serve, slice cooled cake thinly, dust with confectioners sugar, add a dollop of clotted cream and a candied violet. [...]
Hil, kids do love this and they honestly taste really good.
Peggy, I know, I must have been channeling Marye. You should try this. The prettiest thing is a white cake all covered in crystal flowers.
Ooooo, the kids will LOVE this idea!
I’ve never tried this, but I want to. I thought I was on Baking Delights for a minute there!