Cooking with Summer Flowers
As soon as I see a patch of violets or primroses, I know that spring is here. These fragrant flowers can be used in salads or crystallized by using egg white and caster sugar and preserved for decorating cakes later in the year. The fragile petals of early summer's, candy-floss pink dog roses can be gathered and made into rose cordial which will delight any young child. As the seasons progress, harvesting rosehips for a rich syrup or healthier rosehip tea will give a mega dose of vitamin C drink.
The smell of wild honeysuckle is intoxicating, especially at night when it is pollinated by night flying moths. However, although one can easily identify the smell, how do you describe the taste of honeysuckle - this was the question I was asked after making wild honeysuckle jelly.
Looking at wild honeysuckle it has a delicate structure and the frequent visits of industrious bees suggest that it is a very worthy flower, an intricate part of our food chain but I still haven't answered the question, how to describe the taste of honeysuckle?
Many children of cocoa bean producers don't get to taste chocolate and their's is a similar conundrum to my honeysuckle question - how do you describe chocolate to them? Perhaps by using the adjectives: velvety sweet, dark brown and rich. The wild honeysuckle jelly was certainly sweet and thickly gelatinous (there must be lots of pectin in honeysuckle). In the words of one of my children, it tasted of the garden. Quite delicious, as was a white clover sponge cake I made recently after a qucik forage.
Keen gardeners will be be harvesting carrots and this recipe is quite perfect for the knobbly, wobbly carrots that would be rejected on a supermarket vegetable catwalk - they still taste fabulous and in this recipe, which uses honey scented clover too, they'll even look fantastic.
Carrot and White Clover Cake
Serves 8
What to find:
200g carrots
150ml rapeseed oil
125g caster sugar
6 white clover flowers (washed & segmented)
2 large eggs
250g self-raising flour
Heaped tsp baking powder.
For the icing
50g soft butter
150g sifted icing sugar
3 white clover flowers (washed & segmented)
What to do:
Oven350° F 180°C Fan 160°C gas 4
1.Line a 20cm round cake tin with baking paper.
2.Wash, peel (if necessary) and finely grate the carrots.
3.Measure the oil and sugar into a bowl, add the segmented clover heads and beat in the eggs.
4.Sift the flour and baking powder into the bowl and add the grated carrot. Fold the flour and carrot into the oil, sugar, clover and eggs.
5.Turn the mixture into prepared tin and bake in the pre-heated oven for 40-45 minutes until the cake is firm and well risen (it will shrink away from the sides of the tin). Allow to cool for 5 minutes, and then turn the cake on to a cooling rack.
6. To make the icing: sift the icing sugar into a bowl and beat in the softened butter. Add most of the segmented clover flowers, reserving a few to decorate the carrot and clover cake.
7.Spread the clover icing on top of the cold cake and sprinkle the reserved flower segments over the top.
©Fiona Bird