Countryside Cooking | Harvesting Lilacs

Hello and welcome to a day of harvesting lilac blossoms, processing the flowers into a simple syrup, flowered sugar, and several delicious drinks. A slow and quiet day working away, preserving this beautiful flower, and spending some time baking in my cottage kitchen. Stay until the end of this video as we celebrate lilacs with an outdoor tea party. My kitchen smells like a lilac dream. I always loved this humble flower. So many pioneers and settlers took rootstock of this lovely bush and often planted it outside the kitchen window and door. In fact, if you stumble across a lilac bush in the woods or fields, there most likely was a home there long ago. I literally could put lilac bouquets everywhere in my house, but I usually only put two or three and save the rest to enjoy outdoors on the bush. Hello everyone, this is Abbey Jo and welcome to my cottage kitchen. So the lilac blooms are in full bloom in our backyard. I was so excited when we moved here to actually have a lilac bush. I grew up with a lilac bush and they are super sentimental to me. I spent many a summer reading books underneath our huge lilac bush that had to bend, you know, 80 years at our old farmhouse in Oregon growing up. And so lilacs just, it's all memories. As soon as I smell it, I just get washed over with memories. And when I came here this last summer, I was looking through the garden areas in the woods and everything was so overgrown. And we're still cutting everything back and just kind of finding things. But to find a huge lilac, really a tree, I mean, it's a bush, but it's huge. Just warm my heart up so much. I was so thrilled. And just even working in the garden this year, when the sun hits that tree, and you can just smell it as the breeze goes, it just brings back all the memories and all the feels. And I forever love the smell of lilacs. Just remember to only use the common lilac when you're out there cutting lilacs to make lilac sugar and lilac syrup. You don't want to use the Persian lilac, also known as the chinaberry. A way to make sure your flowers are clean is just submerge them in water before you use them and just soak them for a while and anything will swim out if there's any bugs. And also too, if I'm like actually going to make sugar with it, like a lilac flavored sugar, I have to pull all the little blossoms off anyways. So I just double check to make sure there's nothing in there and put them in a bowl and then I add it to my sugar. And I'm just going to give these a little soak. To make lilac water, simply place lilacs in the water and let sit overnight in the fridge or on the counter during the day for six to eight hours and you should have a nice infused water. So I made a whole bunch of lilac water yesterday and I split it with this about halfway and then I added some tea to the lilac water and I just brewed the tea, added the sugar to it and then I added it to the lilac water and it has just a really just flowery light scent to the tea and it's really good and we drank that yesterday and I made a second one today. What's really cool about adding the flowers to the sugar, it's just kind of like adding a vanilla bean to your sugar, you get that vanilla bean sugar, is that it just smells so good. So the lilac, you want to put dry lilacs in your sugar, that's how easy it is. You just take a cup of sugar and you add, you know, a cup or two of your lilacs and you literally just put that lid on and you shake it, put it in a dark spot, shake it and in a couple days it just absorbs that and if it starts getting moist at all, all you have to do is just lay it in a sheet and put it in the oven for like a little bit like on low at 200 if you need to dry out the sugar and another thing I'm going to do is once I'm done with the sugar here and it's already got the flavor so it's ready, is sterilize a couple jars in your oven at like 200 for like 5 to 10 minutes and get these sterile jars all sterile and you put your sugar in them, cap it and after they're cool and put them in your pantry and your sugar and all that flavor will last all winter long and you can either leave the flowers in your sugar and you can actually run it in a blender or a food processor and get all the flowers chopped up real fine. So either or, it's great during the winter because you can actually put on some lilac sugar on your scones or onto some cookies and baked goods and you just get that spring delicious smell in winter time which is really cheery. So my sugar is actually looking a little moist even though the flowers were dry, they've just kind of gotten some moisture so I'm going to pour it into my pan, throw it in the oven and kind of dry the sugar out and then sterilize a jar and put them in and I will have this for winter, a delicious beautiful lilac sugar. I think my flowers had more moisture than I had anticipated and it was a very humid day. I'm going to show you guys how to make a lilac simple sugar syrup. It's really really easy, it's so cool to have and then I'll show you how I'm going to use it. So it's super simple, one cup of water, one cup of sugar and lilacs and about a cup of lilacs. So now I'm just going to add the sugar, one cup and then you're just going to add about one cup of water but actually I infused this lilac water yesterday because I just wanted to give it even extra lilac flavor. So one cup of sugar and that looks like about a cup, one cup of sugar and one cup of lilac water. You just bring that to a boil and once it's all boiled and the sugar is dissolved you're going to throw in the lilac flowers and you're going to let that cool down, put it in a container and let it overnight, you know eight to ten hours steep and get that lilac infused flavor and on top of that I would add two or three little blueberries just to give a little bit of a lavender color. But one of my most favorite things that I like to do is to put flowers and herbs in my ice and this is actually all this gorgeous lilac all in here. It's so pretty and it adds such a spring flavor, summer flavor and I love to just make them and then put them in little baggies and have them in my freezer and just use them whenever I need it. I'm going to show three drinks I made with lilacs. First I'm using about a tablespoon of simple syrup over ice with carbonated sparkling water. Well that's good. It's just a sparkling water with a little simple syrup and ice. It's really refreshing. Next I'm adding the lilac simple syrup to a cup with ice and carbonated water and a little cream to make an Italian soda. My little kids love this drink the most. Okay one more drink and that's the tea which I had yesterday and really enjoyed it. Last one to taste test for you guys and this simple lilac tea which was quite good with hints of floral sweetness. That's refreshing. I love that. That's good. You know you could even put a little bit of lilac on top and do that. See isn't that pretty? It's really fun showing you guys how to use lilacs and I think I'm going to do this even more maybe with dandelions and roses and all kinds of stuff. I really enjoy using medicinal herbs and flowers and all that kind of stuff and foraging. It's just fun and I like sharing it with you guys. After drying the sugar in the oven I decided to blend it up in my Vitamix and make confectioner sugar with it to make a lovely lilac frosting later in the day. I'm going to make a delicious gluten-free lemon bundt cake and to that I will add lilac frosting. For me baking is a very relaxing process and I always get a lot of satisfaction from it. I'm using my homemade vanilla which is simply vanilla beans and vodka. Let it sit in a glass jar in the dark for several months and you end up with a vanilla extract for baking. I'm also using my dried lemon zest that I made during the winter months. I tried spraying my pan with avocado oil but it was way too runny and I ended up washing it all out and using my coconut oil to grease the pan instead. And now for the lilac frosting. I used butter, infused lilac sugar made into a powdered sugar, I added vanilla and some of the simple syrup, and a few blueberries for the lilac color. And doesn't it feel so good when a cake comes out of the pan so beautifully? There is something so special about having a garden tea party out under the tree and celebrating the loveliness of the lilac bush and the simple pleasure of just being together as a family. Thank you for joining me today and I will see you in the next video.