I am excited and cautious at the same time when it comes to cooking with lavender. I grow this wonderful plant but I have never cooked with it. So it occurred to me that there must be more people out there who would hesitate to cook with this plant. There are lots of lavender cookbooks out there - and many lavender recipes on the internet. So there will be no shortage of ideas. Where to start? How do I know this will be a successful culinary adventure? And then it dawned on me - it is just that - an adventure. So join me in my bi-weekly blog on cooking with lavender.
We are going to start with lavender chocolate tarts. This is from a recipe for lavender chocolate pie from
this website.
My grandchildren are helping. We have decided to go with tarts, not pie, because we are making recipes easy enough for the kids to prepare (not to mention easy for grandma). To make it especially easy, we used frozen tart shells, cooked and cooled. We ended up with 24 tarts and 2 martini glasses of 'pudding'.
Here we go! We set everything out: 2 cups of cream, 2 Tbsp dried lavender buds (
Lavendula angustifolia), 8 oz. semisweet chocolate pieces, 1/3 cup sugar. Extra lavender buds and extra sugar to "candy" buds for decoration. Everyone is ready.
There are 478 pieces of chocolate in an 8 oz bag. Fortunately there were more in the bag than we needed, as not all of them made it into the cream.
The lavender in this recipe is added by infusion. We warmed the cream in the microwave (not letting it boil) and let the lavender buds steep in this for 5 minutes. Then we strained the buds out of the cream and put the infused cream in a 'bain marie' (water bath) to melt the chocolate.
We added the chocolate pieces to the warm, lavender-infused cream.
Cam stirred the mixture until the chocolate was thoroughly melted. Then we let the mixture cool a bit.
After the tart shells were baked and cooled we poured in the lavender chocolate cream. The tarts went into the fridge for about 4 hours until they thickened enough not to run.
We blanched another 2 Tblsp of lavender buds in boiling water for 30 seconds. Then we patted them in a paper towel and mixed them into some sugar on a plate. These wonderful little candied buds were sprinkled on top of the cooled tarts. There were lots left over and I am keeping them for decoration.
It was a 2 thumbs up adventure all around.
Licking out the bowl was a favorite part of the exercise.
If you try these, I hope you enjoy them as much as we did. I would definitely make them again!
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