Floral flavours

Even if you don’t have a vegetable patch, you might still find something edible in your garden: flowers.

The Cafe Flora cookbook details the many kinds of flower that are in fact edible – and I was surprised by just how many there are. The one that jumped out at me was lavender – I love lavender, and have all sorts of lavender-scented goodies around my home (lavender cleaning products; home-made lavender sachets; Botanics lavender room spray…). The picture on the right was taken when I visited the Yorkshire Lavender Farm.

I have even eaten lavender – while on holiday I tried lavender creme brulee at Cafe Flora in Seattle, and I was interested to read about the lavender waffles they serve there. I don’t have a waffle-maker, and so lavender-infused pancakes were the next best thing I could think of to try.

Lavender pancakes

INGREDIENTS

• One batch of pancake mix (using Nigella Lawson’s recipe)
• A few stems of fresh lavender from your garden – English lavender will work best
• Honey to serve

METHOD

In creating a recipe for ready-made pancake mix, Nigella Lawson has saved us all some trouble: you make up a batch of the dry ingredients, and then when you wake up on a weekend morning you simply have to mix in a little egg, milk and butter.

It’s at this point that you can add the lavender: use around one teaspoon of chopped lavender for every 150g of pancake mix. Remove the flowers and discard the stalks – you may also wish to chop the flowers into smaller pieces (this will make them easier to eat, and it will also release more of the lavender fragrance into your pancakes).

Cook your pancakes according to Nigella’s instructions, and then drizzle some fresh honey over them when you serve them – if you’re lucky you’ll be able to find some locally-produced lavender honey.