Elderflower season

Like I wrote on my Flowers, Trees and Romance post, I didn’t know a thing about elderflower until Tom told me about it —especially its possibilities as a drink. Even it’s only been four years since then, it feels much longer, as if we’d been making elderflower cordial for ages.

When the season approaches and flowers start blossoming, I notice myself spotting elder trees close to ours. I hadn’t realised how many there are. Below the little bridge close to our home, down the hill, in the woods of the park we sometimes go to (that’s where we went last week), or even by the motorway.

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I love it when we make home made food and drinks. There’s something deeply satisfying about doing the whole process yourself —and obviously elderflower cordial is one of them. You just have to make sure you collect a good amount of elderflower heads. It’s far better to do it on a sunny day —we’ve had terrible weather but managed to do it just before a storm began. Other than this, you just need boiling water, an huge amount of sugar (1kilo) and the zest and juice of 3 lemons and 1 orange.

As soon as you put all these ingredients in a big bowl, a lovely smell will fill the room: floral, sweet and citric. We usually let it rest, covered with a kitchen cloth, for about a week —otherwise, it’ll start fermenting —the flowers naturally have some yeast in them. It’s a really nice refreshing drink to have in summer: usually it is 1 part cordial to 4/5 parts water —depending how strong you like it. After that add lots of ice cubes and a slice of lemon or lime.

This year’s great discovery though, has been my elderflower drizzle cake. We had my family on Saturday for lunch and everyone loved it. The cake was spongy and moist as the drizzle nicely soaks in. Then, just to make it even more decadent, I added a cream cheese frosting which added a creamy texture, decorated with lime zest and tiny elder flowers.

It’s a beautiful time of the year, and doing these things reminds me that summer is close. Surrounded by this beauty, I also feel full of inspiration to paint the still life series I work on whenever I have time. This weekend, when I took out my painting stuff and felt the grainy texture of the paper, I realised how much I’d missed it. When I’m painting, while listening to some music, I get lost in the lines and the colour, and I feel that I could be doing this forever.

Is it the elder’s charm?

P.S. Let me know if you are interested in the recipes, I’d be happy to share!