Quest for the Perfect Lavender Sugar

If you're reading this blog to look for the perfect lavender sugar recipe: stop reading now, you're going to get disappointed: I am still in the middle of my quest and I'm not sure if I've found it yet. 

Lavender had just recently caught my attention when I saw that sparkleskitchen is making lavender flavored macaroon, then a series of events began to happen that fed my interest. My friend Rohan from Bible study mentioned that he tried making lavender ice cream saying that it taste different in a 'posh' sort of way. A couple of days later, Greg and I went to Mick and Suzanne's house. They have lavender at their front yard, so I took some home determined to cook them. Mick pretty much cut me a whole bush to take home!

In risking my food to smell and taste like soap, I started cooking with lavender last Friday. My plan was to make lavender icing to put inside my melting moments cookies. Making melting moments are kind of my baking specialty. I skimmed through a couple of recipes online for lavender icing but then decided to get all courageous and just make one up. I mixed some lavender flowers and leaves with milk, sugar, water... and (an idea that came to me from hell): corn flour- which I believe is the culprit behind making this mix into one really disgusting gooey mess that smell bitter and nothing like lavender. So yea... they end up in the bin.

Refusing to take this defeat, on Monday I went to Suzanne's house, and we baked lavender muffins together. It was basically lavender fed in the food processor then mixed in a normal muffin mix. It tastes nice- but I couldn't really smell the lavender that emerges from the oven that I imagined in my mind.

Nigella's recipe

To raise money after the marathon we did over the weekend, we're having a BBQ and a bake sale- lavenders are definitely going to be involved in this! I found Nigella Lawson's lavender cupcake recipe that is going to rock this bake sale! Noticing that this recipe involves lavender sugar, I tried making it just tonight. I know that mixing lavender and sugar in a food processor is meant to be easy... but for some reason I don't see it that way.

I've got more fresh lavenders from Suzanne the generous, and today I managed to blend lavender and sugar in 3 different ways. I blended 2 cups of caster sugar and 5 sprigs of lavender together. Instead of getting a nice purple sugar as I saw in this recipe, the powder looks more green-ish. Maybe it's because I use fresh lavender instead of dried ones. But anyway, it is in an air tight jar now, and we shall see if it will live up to its expectation when I open it in 2 days time.

Sure enough I got curious and started blending more lavender but this time in icing sugar. I'm hoping that I can use this sugar to make more lavender icing hence redeeming myself from the last one that ended up in the bin.

As you can see, I just put all of the flowers and icing sugar and blend it just as that. When I taste it, it tasted bitter and only smell faintly of lavender. Thinking that this is probably because there's too much stalk and not enough flowers,  I decided to take the buds off the stalk, and do it again:

After doing this, it still tasted a bit bitter. I decided that maybe using fresh lavender isn't the way to go. So I picked some dried lavender that my friend had given me months ago. This is sort of my last resort because I'm not even sure if it's safe to eat after it's been drying for so long. But it still smells nice, and after I blend it, it does look more purple than the other mix- but it still taste bitter.

5 different jars of sugar later and a bench that is covered in white and purple- and nothing to eat in the end, my kitchen felt more like a lab than a kitchen. If I ever reach the end of this quest, maybe I can write a book about 'how many different ways can you butcher a lavender'. When I worked in a florist, I used to treat flowers like kings. I felt so evil when I found myself putting a perfectly well bloomed flower into a food processor- and eating them.

So, lavenders aside, we'll leave the kitchen and move to the studio for a sneak peak of what I've been doing this week: spiral bracelets!

I've made a yellow spiral bracelet to match the existing choker that I listed on Etsy last week. Looking by the variety of coloured pearls I have, I can't resist making them in several different colours. This means that there's a lot less designing and sketching involved in my job this week. But I would like to see them in different colours and if I don't do it now, I might never will unless someone asks for it- I'm not waiting around for that to happen.

These spiral bracelet consist of  13 small spirals, 52 or more tiny swarovski pearls and it takes around 4 hours to make- depending on how many mistakes I make and how distracted I am that day. I've been listening to Esperanza Spalding new CD over and over in the background and watching kitchen nightmares at lunch time. Life's good this way. =)