Elderflower - Malva - June 2021

When I was little me and my mom used to go out and pick elderflowers when their flowers where shining white against the summer greenness. Since we lived in a city It was always a thrilling adventure to go out and find just the right elderflowers trees cause we needed to be able to reach the flowers and preferred if the trees where not growing to close to a major road. When we picked the flowers my mom always said that it is important to say thank you to the tree and say what we are going to use its flowers for, which I still try to do while harvesting from nature.

After we picked the flowers we put them together with sliced lemons and lemon juice in a bucket and boiled together sugar and water. The sugar-mixture were later pored over the flowers while till hot. The bucket was then kept in a cool dark space and was being stirred twice a day. After three days we put the mixture through a strainer and into glass bottle and enjoyed an amazingly tasting elderflower-syrup.

This is our traditional way of making elderflower-syrup and when I saw the beautiful trees here I immediately wanted to do it here as well. I used smaller jars instead of a bucket and the syrup turned out really good. Below are the quantities of all ingredients.

30-40 elderflower flowers
4 lemons 
1 1/2 l water
1 l sugar