Flower Unit Celebration

We like to have a unit "celebration" when possible at the end of units…we used to only do it sometimes, but the children have been insisting on it more and more lately. For our Flower Unit Celebration we basically just made some flower-ish foods and called it good. It was exciting enough because I let them decorate cakes, and they love decorating cakes! 

We made rose petal jelly, lavender and rose syrups, and sugared flowers for the tops of the cakes. All easy, and all beautiful!

Rose Petal Jelly 

1 cup edible rose petals 

1 1/2 cups water 

juice of 1 lemon 

1 1/2 cups granulated sugar 

1 package Sure-Jell pectin 

Combine the rose petals, 3/4 cup water and lemon juice in a blender. Blend until smooth. Slowly add the sugar and blend well. 

Bring the remaining 3/4 cup water to a boil in a small saucepan. Stir in the pectin and boil for 1 minute, stirring constantly. 

Pour the hot mixture into the blender with the other ingredients and blend 1 minute. Pour into sterilized jars and seal. 

Rose Petal Drink

Petals from 3 full-bloom roses

5 cups water

1/2 tsp. lemon juice

3 tbsp. sugar

Instructions

Boil water. Add rose petals and lemon juice to the boiling water, turn off heat and let stand for 6-10 hours. 

Drain into a pitcher. Discard petals. Add sugar to the rose water and stir. Let cool in the refrigerator or freezer. Serve.

We made syrups with rose petals and lavender (we had to buy the lavender since we didn't have it in our garden at the time)—they are easy; here is one recipe. You basically just boil sugar and water with rose or lavender petals until it concentrates into a syrup. They look so pretty!

And then we used the syrups to make Italian Cream Sodas. So good!

For sugared flowers, you blend up sugar in the blender to make superfine sugar. (It becomes almost powdery, but it doesn't have the cornstarch or whatever it is they add to actual powdered sugar.) Then you dip/paint each petal in egg white, sprinkle on the sugar, and let them dry. They look so pretty and taste so flowery and sweet! We used rose petals, violets (I don't know how we had violets growing in the fall! But we did!), day lilies, and mint leaves.

Then we made two cakes (orange juice cake and angel food cake) and let Daisy and Goldie decorate one and Teddy and Junie decorate the other. They loved doing that!