Wednesday 7 October 2015

Crystallised Rose Petals

Two of our friends recently celebrated their engagement with a party, and I wanted to bring something as a gift. She is super-crafty and loves baking, and I thought maybe it would be fun to bring crystallised rose petals, perfect for topping cakes. I have a huge range of roses in the garden so I tried a few varieties:

I used this recipe, and even with a hundred rose petals, I didn't get through a cup of sugar and an egg white. I also found it too fiddly to use tweezers and just picked up the petals by hand. I would like to try simply painting them with sugar syrup next time. All of the varieties were tasty, but for some reason the white roses became very fragile and stuck to the tray completely. The red simple roses worked the best, while the magenta and orange roses were somewhere in between. Better than greaseproof paper are silicon baking tray liners: they provided the best non-stick surface. It's also important to wait a good 24 hours before attempting to remove the petals.

Overall they made a lovely combination of colours, and I gave them to my friend in a jar, separated with layers of greaseproof paper:


Also, once you've made them, don't let them get above about 25C. They can collapse and go sticky, as I found a week later when I checked on the jar of offcuts I stored in a top cupboard.

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