My season of floral flavours continues: cherry plum blossom with its intensely sweet fragrance, picked in muted spring morning sunshine with much buzzing of busy bees who clearly love the blossoms as much as I do, captured in a bottle (or in a thermal flask first…) – on site in the orchard.
Most of my harvesting of whatever sort takes place by bicycle and to ensure maximum cherry plum blossom freshness I prepared my simple syrup
(sugar to water 1:1, in this case 300 ml water to 300 g sugar for about 3 good handfuls of cherry plum blossoms stripped from the twigs)
before setting out, poured it boiling hot into the thermos flask and took it with me to the orchard. I left the syrup – lid off – to cool down to lukewarm while I picked the blossoms (strip them off the twigs into a bowl and leave the blossoms to stand a while to give the bugs a chance to crawl away – give them a helping hand out of the bowl to spend things up).
Once bug-free, I tipped the blossoms (within half an hour of picking) into the now lukewarm syrup, lid on and left it in my bike basket.
Twenty four hours later it I opened the flask: an intense floral almond essence was my reward!
Strained
(through a sieve lined with a disposable, bio-degradable cloth nappy liner that never got used – honestly – they make brilliant filters!)
into bottles to be savoured.
And what am I going to do with it?
Anything that would otherwise require almond essence for starters… first up is going to be Bakewell Tart with cherry plum jam and cherry plum blossom syrup…
Beautiful. I have been wondering about fruit blossoms as a source for syrup since I too am on a bit of a floral kick.
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The wild plum blossom was a real treat Hilda – well worth the minimal effort, yielding a really intensely-flavoured syrup…
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Wow, cooking on a bike – am impressed. I’ve had elderflower syrup (pretty common here in the UK), but never other fruit floral syrups. I wonder if they might make a good sparkling wine like elderflower does? I bet it would be spectacular.
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well … gathering and infusing on a bike at least 🙂 I have never gone beyond elderflower cordial (which we make gallons of every summer) towards elderflower wine… still on my (long…) to-do-list … and yes, wild plum blossom wine would be up there with it 🙂
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Amazing! I never would have thought that the blossoms would have so much flavor!!!
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This is a great idea. I’ve only just found out that you can use blossom in this way, so this post is really useful. Thanks
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Glad you found it – have fun experimenting 🙂
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I am so happy to have found you! This sounds like a wonderful project! Do you ever eat the plum blossoms themselves?
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Welcome Amy! Plum blossom is just wonderful, isn’t it, but, no, I have not actually got as far as eating the blossoms… yet! Let me know if you get to them first 🙂
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