Elderflower cordial

Due to the late start to spring, I was able to enjoy one of my favourite drinks on my birthday this year... Elderflower cordial. I love everything about this drink, the mere taste reminds me of summer. Even the children love it, my daughter has a cute name for it, she calls it 'flower juice'. So I thought I would share our recipe here.

You need to pick about 20 to 30 flower heads on a sunny day, as fresh as possible. I love the smell of these flowers, to me they smell exactly like the cordial tastes.

We usually leave them upside down for a short while to ensure any bugs trapped in the flowers can escape safely. Then pour two litres of boiling water into a large tub, we use our wine fermenting tub, and mix in one kilogram of sugar until it dissolves. Prepare two lemons... we usually zest and juice them, chop up the remains and toss them all into the boiling water.

Once the water has cooled to warm, drop the flowers in too. At this point you add two teaspoons of citric acid, this is a preservative and is available at the chemist. This helps your finished cordial last a little longer, however, we have made it without adding the extra citric acid before without any problems. Everyone here loves it so much it never lasts longer than a few days anyway. Give your mixture a stir and leave it to infuse for 24 to 48 hours depending on the strength you prefer.

After infusing you will need to strain the flowers out of the liquid and bottle it up in sterilised bottles. It will be strong as it needs to be diluted with water to drink it. Then just enjoy...

Quick July Update.

It has been so busy here lately, we have had three birthdays and an anniversary, I have had two assignments to do and my eldest daughter has spread her wings and moved away from home. On top of all this it has been two months now since my cat went missing and my blog had it's first anniversary, which I missed. So posts here have not been very frequent, just the odd celebration post but we have been doing things... honestly.

At the start of the summer we made the most wonderfully tasting elderflower cordial, it kept us going for a while and the children loved it so much. The taste of this will forever remind me of the start of summer, my daughter affectionately named it 'flower juice'. Details of how this was made is on my husband's blog. He has also started off some more wine, last year we made some amazing wines, I'm hoping he can recreate these again this year. He has written about the wine in the post after the one above in case you fancy a read.

The allotment and the vegetables that we grow in the garden have really taken off, in fact last year I thought I had a glut of courgettes but that was nothing compared to this year! Everything I have cooked has included courgette and I do mean everything... courgettes are coming out of our ears. Of course I have made more courgette relish as seen in the above photograph, only this time I made a double batch of the one from last year. This year the relish tastes even better which is good as I may be forced to make another batch.

Must introduce you to one of our newest family members, this is one of our giant African land snails, we have had them for a few weeks now and they have amazed us with their antics and have doubled in size. My daughter loves snails and is constantly watching them as they bury themselves and munch their food... very loudly. We also have some stick insect eggs, my son is avidly waiting for them to hatch so that he can study them, as well as the pupating caterpillars. We will keep you informed of progress in the mini zoo.

You may have noticed the two blog awards in the side bar, I was given these at the end of June and I still haven't got around to thanking those responsible and passing them on. Watch this space though I will get to them shortly and everything else I may have missed out.