Lilac Sugar

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Last time, I mentioned that Chele and I have been experimenting with edible flowers recently, primarily by making them into floral sugars. As promised, we are following with more info about what we have been up to. Now there are quite a few edible flowers that you probably already know, even if you haven’t eaten them personally. Lavender, rose, orange blossom, chamomile, hibiscus… to some they may seem a bit exotic to cook with, but I’m sure most of you are at least aware that they have culinary uses. But the list of edible flowers goes on much, much longer than that.

For some years now, Chele and I have talked about trying to make candied violets after I showed her a recipe for them in an old book that I have. While we still haven’t made those, we did take a step closer this year and harvested enough violets to play with, and ended up making both violet sugar and violet syrup. We’ve very much enjoyed experimenting with it… to the point where we don’t have enough left to photograph! Since we are past peak violet season here, we will need to wait until next year for more on those. But we didn’t stop with violets, and we absolutely have something else ready to share with everyone today.

Shortly after our initial violet adventure, I was visiting Chele and sitting with her at her patio table. Just a few feet away was her rather large lilac bush, which was just starting to bloom. As we sat there taking in the fragrance drifting across her yard, we got to thinking: are lilacs edible? A quick peek at Google showed us – why yes, they are! It was decided on the spot that lilacs were our next target for the kitchen. The following weekend, when they were in full bloom, we harvested a big bag full of them and got to work on turning them into something sweet.

We started with a simple lilac sugar, basing it on the technique we used for our violets found in this post from a blog called The Patchy Lawn. To adapt that for lilacs, we needed to strip the individual flowers from the clusters, and then pick through them to remove the tiny green calyxes and any bits of stem, along with any dead flowers, leaves, and tiny spiders that we didn’t want in the finished product, I won’t lie – it’s tedious work. But think of it as a labor of love, well worth it in the end.

We have a number of ideas for this sugar that we haven’t had a chance to try yet, but so far we have really been enjoying using it in lemonade (especially with a generous shot of Tan Taka Tan, a shiso-infused Japanese spirit that we have recently discovered and become obsessed with). We’ve also been using it to sweeten things like applesauce and tea. It is quite potent, though, much like lavender. We advise using it sparingly – adding too much can make whatever you are using it in taste like soap!