HOMEMADE EDIBLE FLOWER BISCUITS

Homemade edible flower biscuits

Edible flowers and dried herbs are definitely one of my favourite ingredients for cooking and baking. When it comes to flowers I love them standing in a glass vase on the table, embroidered on oversized sweater, pressed between the book pages, floating around a mug of tea or arranged on a wallpaper pattern. Nature inspires most of my work, from homemade treats to fabric pattern design to textile wall hangings. Homemade edible flower biscuits are yet another gorgeous way to have more flowers in the house! Time to treat the kids and also your souls ladies! Btw – you may also enjoy making the homemade lavender honey ice cream!

Edible flowers – the timeless trend!

It has recently become a trend again to add edible flowers to salads, use them for cake decorating or baking. The art of edible flowers by Rebecca Sullivan is an amazing cookbook which teaches you all about different kinds of edible flowers and also many creative recipes that bring an artistic twist to your kitchen! Rebecca is also an author or two other excellent ‘The art of….’ books – The art of herbs for health, and The art of natural beauty. All three are great have’s to nurture any poetic soul. Something I really love is browse through pages of slow living, nature or creativity inspired book.

Edible flowers in cuisine

There are different kinds of edible flowers to experiment with – roses, lilacs, pansies, violets, daisies, borages and other kinds of blooming herbs such as lavender. Many can be grown in either indoor or outdoor gardens, and picked fresh for immediate use.

For this recipe that I am going to share I decided to pick fresh garden flowers and wild roses. I pressed the garden beauties between book pages for a couple of days. It’s a great alternative between fresh and dried edible flowers when you don’t immediately get to prepare the recipe. I’ve also purchased a pack of edible flower seeds to grow more edible florals on my windowsill!

It’s that time of a year when all wild roses begin to bloom. Wild roses AND elderflowers hanging over each other in beautiful meadows, surrounded with bold red poppy flowers. I took my boy for a walk to pick the blossoms to make delicious homemade floral biscuits. It’s another creative nature-inspired project, great for introducing calm and mindfulness to these busy days.

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Homemade floral biscuits

• Preparation time: 30 mins
• Baking time: 20 mins
• The ingredients are enough to make approx. 35 biscuits.

Ingredients:

• 125g of butter (room temperature or roughly grated if hard)
• 175g of all purpose flower
• 60g of icing sugar
• 3 tbl spoons of caster sugar (to coat wild flowers)
• 1 egg
• a squeeze of lemon zest
• 1/2 tea spoon of grated lemon peel
• 1 vanilla bean pod (optional, can be used to infuse the icing sugar – just open the bean and place into the container of with icing sugar over night)
• All kinds of edible flowers – dried edible flower mix or fresh blossoms (home grown or from wholefoods store)

Preparation:

Coating fresh wild roses

For this recipe I’ve used a mixture of edible garden flowers and herbs (very straight forward use), and also a handful of wild rose blossoms.

Wild rose blossoms are not only edible but also full of vitamin C and known for their calming properties. Of course they are amazing to look at too! They are, however, also quite thick unlike many other edible flowers.
In case you are wondering how the edible flowers taste – well many of them actually have a very mild taste, almost close to not tasting like anything. This can be quite handy if they are only added for the visual effect. That way they won’t overpower the taste of the main ingredient.

Wild roses can have a stronger taste and of course due to their thicker structure can also be harder to eat. No surprise! Although small you are indeed eating the entire blossom.

To avoid any unwanted tastes I tend to first brush all wild rose blossoms with egg white and then sprinkle with caster sugar. This adds a beautiful texture to the rose and also – it helps to caramelise the blossom and give it a bit more of a sweet flavour. Cutting off the green tip at the bottom of the blossom is optional.

A thing to be mindful off when coating anything in egg white and sugar is that consuming raw eggs is not recommended for vulnerable groups of people. These are babies, children, pregnant women and elderly people. To respect this I like to make the biscuits well done if I know it will be my toddler eating them!

Dough:

Mix butter, flour, sugar, egg yolk and lemon zest with grated peel, and form a dough. If you find the dough sticking to your fingers add more flower, just not too much to suppress the buttery taste. Once you have a nice fluffy yellow dough roll it with your hands into a roll, with approx. diameter of 3 cm.

Use knife to cut the roll into small pieces  about 1 to 1 1/2 cm thick. Place them onto a baking tray and now the creative fun part!

Decorate the biscuits with edible flowers as you please! Use freshly picked flowers, pressed edible flowers or even dried edible flower mix!

Bake a full tray for approx. 20 minutes, less if you don’t want your biscuits well done and prefer a lighter colour.

Enjoy your sweet well deserved treat! Xx

Have you enjoyed this creative project? Why not pin it to one of your Homemade or Creative Pinterest boards for later!