My daughter has big ideas. Lots of them. This is brilliant and I love her for it. The only downside is I often get dragged into these ideas and, quite frankly, they're exhausting.
Take last week for example.
"Mummy, can we make some cupcakes? Archie wants to take them in for everyone in drama club. You know... for his birthday."
I should point out that Archie didn't seem aware that he wanted to do this and showed no interest in taking part but Ava was enthusiastic so I thought it wouldn't do any harm knocking up a dozen little cakes.
"We'll need 48."
"What!"
"And they'll need decorating."
As I said... exhausting.
Thankfully, I had just taken delivery of Petal, Leaf, Seed - a new book by my friend Lia Leendertz. It's utterly gorgeous and full of inspiring recipes using... well.... petal, leaves and seeds not surprisingly. But what caught my eye was a beautiful petal cake. Genius, I thought, we can decorate using flowers!
In her recipe Lia used marigold and cornflower petals but we're a little early in the season for those. Thankfully she has a section going through all sorts of edible flowers and I realised that my garden was full of one of them - forget-me-nots.
So we topped the cakes with a little butter icing and the children set up a production line picking off the tiny blue flowers and dotting them on the cake. As Lia says, fresh flower decorations need eating the same day or they will shrivel up and look less appetising but, surprise, surprise all 48 cakes were consumed in a morning.
"That went down really well. We should do it again!"
I ignored her.
My kids love to pick flowers from the war. Now they are going crazy with dandelions. Cooking using petals is a great idea! I like to make cakes, and with the help of my children I think we can surprise mom with some muffins...
Posted by: Javi | May 02, 2016 at 11:02 PM
Great idea Javi - and there are loads of sites which list all the edible ones
Posted by: Dawn | May 03, 2016 at 11:07 AM