Cooking with lavender

I’m back to cooking with lavender. Lavender is a wonderful flower with a beautiful colour and powerful scent. It is also an edible flower, giving a wonderful flavour to your cooking. In the early days of the pandemic, when the world was being turned upside down and everything was very uncertain, I started cooking a lot more with lavender, because it is said to have calming powers – and it seemed to work! It may have been psychosomatic, but I’m not sure if that matters. We all needed something to keep calm. I am now back to cooking with lavender, since this year has once more got off to rather a tumultuous start with war in Europe and inflation causing chaos on the price of many things. There are many fun options you can find for cooking with lavender, but at the moment I am really enjoying small lavender biscuits, wonderful with a cup of coffee or tea in the morning. Or try using lavender sugar (instead of plain sugar) in your scones. Or even using it instead of cinnamon for an apple cake.

You can buy dried culinary lavender from the supermarket or specialist store. If you have edible lavender in your garden you can dry the flowers yourself and use. It can be used as is, crushed to get out more flavour or added to sugar and left for some days to make lavender sugar.

Lavender can also be used in savoury dishes – try sprinkling it on your chicken before you roast or grill it, for example.

Here is my favourite recipe for lavender and lemon biscuits – originally from www.thelavenderfields.co.uk , I’ve made just a few adjustments!

125 g wholemeal flour

100 g plain flour

1.5 tsp baking powder

100 g butter

125 g sugar

1 tsp culinary lavender, crushed

Grated rind of 1 lemon

1 egg

Sift the flours and baking powder into a bowl. Then rub in the butter until it resembles breadcrumbs. Stir in the sugar, lavender and lemon rind. Finally beat in the egg, and stir well – preferably for a minute or two.

Shape the dough into a flattened ball, then wrap in foil and leave it for at least 30 minutes in the fridge to cool.

Turn the oven on now, at 190°C (180°C fan setting).

Roll the dough out on a floured surface, until about 0.5 cm thick. Cut out biscuits using a round biscuit cutter, which is about 5 cm in diameter. Place on a baking sheet, which has a sheet of baking paper on it.

Bake the biscuits for about 10 min, until they start to turn golden. Take out, leave to rest for a few minutes, then place on a wire rack and leave to cool completely.

The biscuits get a stronger flavour if left for a day before starting on them – if you can wait that long