Baking With Flowers

What’s in your baking essentials cupboard? Eggs? Sugar? Butter? Cocoa powder? Flours? Flowers? Yes, you did read that right and, no, we haven’t simply gotten our homophones muddled.

It’s not just about plain old plain flour and trusty self-raising anymore in the world of baking, thanks to gamechangers like coconut flour and chickpea flour, and jazzing up bakes is no longer just about hundreds and thousands or those little silver balls that you still don’t trust are actually edible; food should not resemble metal so closely. No, instead, edible flowers have become increasingly popular in baking, and, they’re oh so Instagrammable.

via GIPHY

While we’re all spending the next few days in floral heaven thanks to constant TV coverage of the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, we think it’s the perfect time to learn how to use some of those blooms from your screen in your baking at home. You might not be hobnobbing with the likes of The Queen and gardening royalty Monty Don at Chelsea, but you’ll have delicious baked goods.

Rose petals are a nice introduction to baking with flowers for the first time, and they’re widely available in shops across the UK. They add an extra injection of sweetness to a bake, along with delicate fragrant notes to crank up the sophistication of your kitchen creations.

To infuse that unique rose flavour throughout your bake, use rose water in your recipe too. In these gluten and dairy-free chocolate, beetroot and rose brownies from My Moroccan Food, both rose petals and rose water are used to create a stunning traybake like no traybake you’ve ever seen before. Just think how good they’ll look on your Instagram with that gorgeous pink decoration – oh, and how good they’ll taste, of course…

Dried lavender is not just for putting in those little cloth bags you tie with a ribbon and shove in your wardrobe to keep your clothes smelling fresh; you can eat it too (but not the ribbon or the cloth bag).

Lavender adds an unusual but lovely taste to a bake, and a great place to start is this recipe for lavender shortbread from Wallflower Kitchen. If you’re already familiar with biscuit-baking, all you need to do that’s different to normal is add your lavender. And if you’ve never made shortbread before, what’s stopping you from starting here?! Nothing, that’s what.

Okay, so this next recipe is cheating a tiny bit, as it doesn’t technically use any actual flowers, but it does use violet-flavoured liqueur, so it’s a good one to try if you’re not too sure about eating actual flowers.

Remember Parma Violet sweets? So sugary, so artificial tasting, so amazing. Well, that’s what these cupcakes from Diary of a Mad Hausfrau should taste like. The recipe is for classic white velvet cupcakes topped with a gorgeous purple, violet-flavoured buttercream.

They’ve been topped with sugar paste flowers in the recipe, but if you’ve got full on Chelsea Flower Show fever, use real violas instead. Their stunning purples and yellows will look outstanding on your cakes, and everyone will think you’re a cake decorating pro, when all you really will have done is shove some flowers on the top. The best kind of trickery.

Another route into baking with flowers if you’re not too sure about their flavours is to simply use them for decoration, like The Merrythought has done in this recipe for floral strawberry tarts.

With a puff pastry base (buy ready-rolled if you’re pushed for time – even the Queen of Baking Mary Berry has admitted to doing this in the past, so if it’s good enough for Mary…), mascarpone cream and sweet, fresh strawberries, they’re a classic fruit tart.

However, adding edible flowers really takes them up a level, making them perfect for a party – or just for when you fancy a snack and want to feel sophisticated.

You might already know that drinking chamomile tea is good for reducing your stress levels and helping you to nod off at night, but did you know you can eat dried chamomile flowers too?

Chamomile flowers are great in cakes, like these chamomile cupcakes from Ever So Sweet Blog.

They’re topped with a gorgeous lemon and honey-flavoured buttercream icing – more stuff from the garden (well, at Chelsea maybe, not ours – all we’ve got is a broken plastic slide and half-finished decking) – which gives them a gorgeously sweet and oh so moreish taste. Yum.

If you fancy yourself as the next Mary Berry, then you need to try out this pistachio, rose and white chocolate cake from Pudding Lane Blog. It uses a really unusual but ever so tasty sponge, flavoured with dried rose petals and crushed pistachios, it’s topped with a dreamy white chocolate icing and decorated with more rose petals and pistachios.

It’s a truly stunning bake, and perfect for a summer afternoon tea in the garden, if the rain holds off, and if you can tear yourself away from Joe Swift talking about plants on the telly – we could listen to that man for hours.