Flower Recipes – Wildness (2024)

I don’t make macarons often. They aren’t a complicated cookie, but they are fussy about humidity and oven temperature. This week is cookie week here at ‘Wildness’ for a practical reason. Very soon my kitchen will be too hot to bake in. Today is the warmest day of the year so far, and I’ve already started having trouble with the buttercream. But nothing says spring like a row of rainbow cookies. Step into just about any bakery this time of year and you’ll see that they’re a ‘thing’.

The sky is the limit when coloring and flavoring macarons. Here, I’ve used sugar that’s been infused with pineapple weed (the green ones) and a rose hydrosol (in place of vanilla) for the pink ones.

To infuse sugar, simply take a 1/2 a cup of fresh pineapple weed (Matricaria discoidea) and whirl it in the blender with a cup of sugar until everything becomes a lovely shade of green. Spread the resulting paste on a foil covered cookie sheet and place in the oven on it’s lowest setting, until it’s dry. Rewhirl in the blender to remove any lumps, and you have a wonderful flavored sugar to add to baked goods and teas.

For the rose hydrosol, make your own from wild roses or use an easy button and purchase some rose water at the store.

Pineapple Weed Macaron Recipe

2/3 cup fine ground almond meal
1 1/2 cups powdered sugar
3 large room temperature egg whites
5 tablespoons pineapple weed infused granulated sugar
(a few drops of get coloring is optional)

Line 2 cookie sheets with parchment paper. Wash a quarter (yes, a 25 cent piece) well. Alternately, you can use whatever you have for a template that’s about an inch in diameter. (You don’t have to do this step, but your meringue cookie shapes will be much more uniform and pretty. Trace with a pencil around the quarter onto the parchment paper HARD. You’ll turn the paper over (you don’t want to get lead on your cookies) so you want to see it through the fairly transparent paper.

Sift the almond meal and the confectioners sugar together and set aside. Beat egg whites with a mixer until foamy, then add the granulated sugar, a tablespoon at a time. Continue to beat the egg whites until stiff and glossy. Add the gel coloring if you’re using it.

Gently fold 1/2 of the almond-powdered sugar mixture into the egg whites. When fully incorporated, add the other half and continue folding until mixed. There is a lot of chatter in cookbooks about getting the texture of the batter right and many methods such as beating the batter with the back of the spatula, and you can fuss with that if you like, but I never do.

Spoon the batter into a frosting bag (or a zip lock and snip a teeny bit of corner off) and pipe onto your templates on the parchment.

Now, just let the meringue rounds sit for 15 minutes to form a nice, shiny surface. You can turn the oven on to 280 degrees Fahrenheit while you wait.

After 15 minutes and when your oven reaches temperature, place the cookie sheets on the two lowest shelves of the oven. You’ll be baking a total time of 16-18 minutes and you’ll need to turn the sheets and trade positions at least once to get everything even. You don’t want the meringues brown, but you do want them dry on the inside.

Remove the meringues from the oven and place on a wire rack. When completely cool, pipe one side with the filling of your choice (ganache, buttercream, Nutella, whatever) and sandwich with another meringue.

Buttercream Filling
7 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
2 egg yolks
1/4 cup pineapple weed infused sugar
3 1/2 tablespoons milk

Whisk the egg yolks in a small bowl, add the sugar and continue to whisk until the mixture is light colored and the sugar is dissolved. Add the milk and whisk until mixed.
Put mixture in a saucepan and heat gently while whisking, until the mixture becomes thick and resembles vanilla pudding.
Remove from heat and pour back into bowl and whisk constantly until it returns to room temperature. Whisk in the softened butter, and continue to whisk until everything is combined. Place in a frosting bag (or another ziplock bag) and pipe onto meringues.

To make the delicate rose flavor meringues, use regular granulated sugar instead of flavored and fold in a teaspoon of rose hydrosol (rose water) to the glossy egg whites. For the filling, add 1 teaspoon of the rose water after the mixture has been removed from the stove.

So the long, hot summer continues.

My house was built in 1906, and apparently the builders used Kleenex as insulation. The house sits on a southern slope and most of the large windows face west.

A summer afternoon can be unbearable.

The worst part is that the house holds it’s warmth well into the night, so sleeping is difficult. And cooking is misery.

I search for small ways to relieve the cloying heat. When it’s 110 degrees Fahrenheit, my brain fries. I need simple. I need easy.

This recipe is simple, beautiful and delicious.

Make ice cubes from your fruit and flower syrups. In the picture above, I’ve used elderberry syrup, rose syrup and bougainvillea syrup (note: only the colorful flower bracts of the bougainvillea are edible).

Stack the ice cubes in a glass and add plain or sparkling water.

The ice cubes melt and the flavors combine to make a wonderful ‘wildflower’ punch.

I don’t make violet jelly every year. It’s anon-again, off-again project for me.

But I’ve been asked to speak at a large gathering and bring ‘pretty’ foods. Violet jelly certainly qualifies.

It’s astraight forwardand easy recipe. I gather the violets over a week or so and store them in my freezer in a ziplock until I’m ready tomakejelly. Decoct the violets in boiling water, add sugar andlemonjuice and ‘Presto-Chango‘, the color changes from violet blue to lavender pink.

Well, that’s the theory anyway.

The lemon juice should alter the pH so that the anthocyanins (the colorthat’sin things like violets and red cabbage) should change. If you keep the pH fairly neutral, you’ll keep the blue-violet color. Go more to the acid side of the scale and you get a lavender, tip the scale to the alkaline side and youflattenthe anthocyanins and get a yellow-ish green color.

I wanted a least a few jars to stay thedarkviolet-blue, so I opted not to add lemon juice to those.

The picture at the top are all the jars, with lemon and without. They ended up exactly the same color.

I didn’t get any blue jelly at all. That’s when I realized that both my water and sugar are mildly acidic.

(sigh) No blue for me.

My friend Holly lives in an area where the water is very alkaline. Her jelly turned yellow. Tasted delicious but still yellow.

But I have to admit, they are still beautiful.

The intensity of the color of the jelly depends on how many violets you start with. Although the recipe called for 2 cups (which have resulted in a pink color), I amped it up to almost 4 cups of flowers.

Here’s the recipe:

Pour 2 cups boiling water over 2 cups of violet flowers (I used almost 4 cups of flowers). Allow to sit overnight.

Add 1/4 cup lemon juice (strain this well if you want clarity) and 4 cups of sugar. Bring to a boil. You can add a number of things for pectin (if you don’t add pectin, you’ll end up with violet syrup): crabapples,powderedpectin and liquid pectin. I’ve used all three but I wanted this jelly clear, so I opted for one package of liquid pectin. Boil for an additional two minutes. Skim, pour into jars, seal and process in a water bath for 10 minutes.

Easy-Peasey.

I’ve made elderflower cordial for a couple of years now and every year that I make it, I think ‘I should have just made lemon syrup and saved myself a lot of time and trouble’.

I’ve tasted commercially produced cordials from Europe and they don’t seem to be nearly as ‘lemony’ as the stuff we make here in the States. The commercially prepared cordial tastes like elderflower with a bit of lemon for tartness. Yes, it does have some ‘artificialflavors’ alongwith the natural ones, but it tastes a lot better than the ‘lemon with floral undertones cordial’ that the internet recipes produce.

Almost every recipe that I’ve seen calls for 3 or 4 whole lemons. That’s a lot of lemon. Most recipes also call for boiling the flowers, or at the very least, using boiling water. The floral properties of the elderflower seem so fragile and delicate, that I believe that they’re easily destroyed by heat. Flowers that are sweet and fragrant going in to the ‘ hot dunk’ don’t seem to transfer their lovely properties to the syrup and let the overpowering lemons becomeprominent You need a little tartness to balance thesaccharinesweetness of the syrup, but we’re after a balance here, not a lemonhead candy.

If you didn’t read my earlier blog about how to handle fresh elderflowers, here’s a recap:
-Pick elderflowers that are more cream-colored and less green-colored. You’ll be able to compare the flowers on the tree to understand this. The greener flowers have unopened buds and won’t add flavor.
-Make sure the flowers aren’t dropping off the coymb. If they are, that particular head of flowers is too old. Leave it to produce berries for later use.
-Don’t pick the flowers, put them in your pack, and continue on a four hour hike. The flowers will develop an unpleasant odor. Bring them home andrefrigeratethem.
-Don’t rinse the flowers prior to using them. You’ll wash away a lot of the delicate pollen which is where a lot of flavor comes from. Just shake them gently to get the bugs out. You’ll find other bugs as you process the flowers and be able to remove them then, too.
-Remove all the green stems. Don’t worry about the tiny white pedicles that hold the flowers on the stem. Yes, I know that seems like a big chore, but once you get the technique down (hold the blooms between your middle finger and forefinger and snip-snip-snip with the scissors) it goes pretty quickly. If you leave many green stems on, they add a ‘rank’ flavor to whatever your making. Besides,everythingon an elder other than the blooms and the berries are toxic.
-When you’ve cleaned out your bag, you may find quite a bit of pollen sticking to it’s sides and bottom. Be sure to add that to whatever it is that you’re cooking. The pollen adds flavor and is responsible for a lot of the sunshine color in your cordial.

For the cordial:
Use between 20 and 30 flower heads. Flower heads vary in size of course, so just use your judgement. You want to leave plenty of blooms for berry production, so take your blooms from several trees.
Make about 8 cups of simple syrup (1:1) and let it cool to about 100 degrees.
Pour it over the prepared flowers (see above).
Add 2 tablespoons of lemonjuice. If you like, add a bit of lemon rind, but don’t go overboard. Actually, youcouldadd all kind of citrus instead of lemons. Try blood orange. Try limes. Try a Meyer lemon.

Add 2 teaspoons ofcitricacid. (Both thecitricacid and the lemon juice helps to balance out the flavor of the cordial and the citric acid also acts as an antioxidantto help preserve the color and as a natural preservative.
Cover and let macerate for 2 days.
Strain.

At this point the cordial is perfectly good to bottle. But I wanted to ‘amp’ up the elderflower flavor, so I did a sort of ‘double-infusion’. This sounds more complicated than it is. I gathered another 20 heads of elderflower, prepared them, added them to the syrup that I just strained and let them sit for another two days. If you wanted to add the tiniest bit of vanilla bean here, it would be a good time.

After sitting for two days, strain again and bottle.
This should keep about 4 months in therefrigerator If you wanted to reheat the strained cordial and then water-bath can for a longer shelf life, note that you will lose a bit of thebeautifulcolor and scent. But it will still taste darn good. And not over-lemony.

The jar on the right has been through a water-bath. You can see that the heat has altered the color slightly.

It’s mid-spring here, and already it’s hot and dry. There is strength in the green grass for a few weeks longer, but soon ouremerald hills willchangeto the color of ginger. When that happens the thought of fire is never far from our thoughts.

For now, I sleep with the windows open and relish the nightly delta breeze tickling my back. I try to engrave the feeling in my mind so that I can call it back up when the temperature rises to 110 degrees.

I’m making the most of what I consider ‘spring foods’ because they aren’t going to last long once the heat hits hard.Elderflower is on, perhaps a little bit earlier this year. It’s abundant in this area which is a good thing, because I enjoy it’s delicate floral essence and try to use it often.

Asparagus is abundant too, Asparagus always brings memories of my mother piling it on my plate and admonishing me:‘Asparagus is Jackie Kennedy’s favorite vegetable’. Ok, Mom. But don’t even come near me with a pillbox hat.

I wanted a way to mix those early spring flavors and naturally my thoughts turned toward a nice Hollandaise and using the sauce to anchor the two foods.

Elderflower is wonderful to work with, but it takes care:
-Pick flowers that are more cream-colored and less green. The green ones have too many unopened buds to add any flavor.
-Make sure that the flowers aren’t dropping off the corymbs as you pick it. If they are, it means those particular flowers are too old. Leave them to produce berries.
-Don’t pick the flowers and then leave them in your pack for a few hours while youfinishyou’re hike. Bring them home andrefrigeratethe blooms immediately.
-Don’t rinse the flowers prior to using them. You’ll wash away a lot of the delicatepollenwhich is where a lot of flavor comes from. Just shake them gently to get any bugs out. You’ll find others as you work the flowers and you can remove them then.
-Remove all the green stems. Don’t worry about the tiny white pedicles that hold the flowers, Yes, I know that seems like a chore, but once you get the technique down (sort of hold the blooms between you’rforefingerand middle finger and going snip-snip-snip with the scissors), it goes quickly. If you leave the green stems on, they’ll add a rank flavor to whatever you’re making. Besides, any parts of the elder, other than the flowers and berries are considered toxic.

When you’ve cleaned out your bag, you may find quite a bit of pollen clinging to the sides. Add it to whatever you’re cooking to increase the ‘elderflower’ flavor.

As far as a recipe, if you have a favorite Hollandaise recipe, just use that. Simply gently poach a handful or two of cleaned elderflowers in the butter for a few minutes on very low heat. You cansieveout the flowers or not, your choice.

If you don’t have a favorite recipe, here’s mine:
Simmer 2 handfuls of elderflower (prepped as described above) in 1/2 cup of unsalted butter.
Whisk 4 egg yolks and a squeeze of fresh lemon juice together in a glass or stainless steel bowl (you’ll be using this as a double boiler, so make sure it fits in another saucepan),untildoubled involume.
Place the bowl in a pot of simmering water (or use a double boiler if you have one), and continue to whisk the egg mixture constantly. If you let the mixture get too hot, you’ll end up withscrambledeggs.
While still whisking, slowly add the infused butter. Whisk until mixture is doubled involumeand then remove from heat.
Whisk in a pinch of salt andcayennepepper.

You can serve it over asparagus (or on the side) or as Eggs Benedictfor a fancy brunch.

Often, using wild foods means a lot of time in the kitchen. Many ingredients need at least some processing prior to use. Flours must beground. Seeds must be sorted. Fermenting, drying, sorting, soaking, pickling, canning, all take patience. So gathering a food on the fly, slipping it into a recipe, and enjoying almost instant gratification, is a simple pleasure. Theseuncomplicated dishes bring me joy in unexplainableways. Barely dressed, almost naked, the fresh, pure flavors and smells of wild food stand on their own, with out the complication of complex preparation. And somehow, thesimplestpresentation becomes a moment of indulgence.

I don’t cook with black locust blossoms (Robinia psuedoacacia) very often. It blooms at just about the same time as its cousin, wisteria (Wisteria sinensis), and I prefer to use that in it’s place. It’s not because I like one more than the other. It’s all about logistics. I’m short. The naturalizedvine doesn’t limit its spread to a vertical direction; it shrouds everything that grows near it in a choke hold. Long pendulous blooms can be found a foot off the ground or 40 feet in the air. There are always plenty of flowers within my reach.

The black locust on the other hand, is amediumsized tree and it often lifts its thorny branches just beyond my reach. I may be able to reach a few racemes, but I rarely collect enough to do more than use it as a trail side nibble.

The two plants are similar in many ways; neither are native to my area, they both are wonderfully fragrant and in both species only the flowers can be used. (This is important: Do not eat the bark, tendrils, the seed pods, the leaves, the root or any other part of either plant. Use the flowers only.) Because they have so many similarities, the flowers of the wisteria and the black locust can be usedinterchangeablywhen itcomesto cooking.

Both species are very, very fragrant. Their perfume reminds me of a sophisticated version of a sweet pea, with the wisteria being slightly stronger. Both are lovely in salads, fritters, ice creams, desserts, and anywhere you’d like to add a bit of fragrant ‘crunch’. The single caveat that I’ve found is that wisteria doesn’t hold up to heat well. In order to enjoy it’s essence in a baked or fried dish, the flowers must be infused into the individual components of the dish while they’re still cold, then use the strained syrup, sugar, cream in the recipe as usual.

Yesterday, while out looking for a few sugar pine cones, I found a couple of black locust trees with low branches. Score! My freezer is already full of wisteria blossoms for agua fresca later this summer, and I’ve canned several pints of wisteria syrup so I decided that a simple spring breakfast of pancakes with elderflower syrup was going on the menu.

Making Black Locust Pancakes

You can use your favorite pancake batter recipe if you’d like and just throw in a couple of heaping handfuls of black locust blooms. The flowers are sweet on their own, so I chose to make these pancakes sugarless by substituting apple cider for the sugar and adjusting theconsistency accordingly. I added a little extra baking powder to help support the heavy blossoms. For the elderflower syrup, I simply boiled down a cup of elderflower cordialuntil the volume was reducedby about half.

The cakes are light,fluffyand fragrant and will make an ordinary week-day breakfast seem like an elegant brunch with barely any extra fuss. Serve with some fresh fruit on the side or a glass of orange juice and a really good cup of coffee.

Simple elegance.