Gifts from the garden

Bouquets, posies and vegan elderflower and wild strawberry cupcakes.

It is the summer holidays!

We have just woken on the first morning of the summer holidays. I am so excited to have my little ones home for eight weeks. It is an unusually long holiday here in Scotland, most summer holidays are between six and seven weeks long but this year I am blessed to have the whole family to together for eight weeks. It feels like the last summer before life starts moving on in a different direction again. My youngest will start nursery after the summer, so I will have three days a week to work and figure out who I am when I don’t have a small child following my every footstep. This will be the first time in eight years I will have had time to myself.

The last couple of weeks have been extremely busy with end of term activities and saying goodbye to teachers who have been so kind and helpful to my children. As a result we have been busy making homemade gifts for the teachers. The biggest gift was a huge bouquet of flowers for my son’s teacher which I was asked to make as a gift from the whole school. His teacher has been incredible and will be deeply missed. She has a bright sunny personality so I wanted her bouquet to have as many colours in it as possible. I used astrantia, campanula, roses, red campion, cornflowers, verbascum clementine, giant scabious, calendula, lysimachia punctata and some oregano which is now in flower.

Being able to walk through the garden selecting flowers specifically for someone is very special. Trying to find flowers that fit their personality, knowing what they like, things that will surprise them and that each flower has been loved and cared for whilst growing is a gift in itself.

For the little gift bags we made for all of the teachers we also included a small bunch of homegrown lavender tied together with string which will dry and they will be able to keep for years to come, if they so wish.

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Last weekend we also celebrated one of my best friends 40th birthdays. She had a party on the beach on the summer solstice so I made her a floral crown. I have always loved the Scandinavian floral crowns which they make to celebrate midsummer so I thought I would give it a go myself for the first time.

I was really surprised how simple they are to make all you need is;

• Lots of flowers with stems about 7cm long (I used a mix of clover, ox eye daisies, cornflowers, lavender, cosmos, forget-me-nots, red valerian, buttercups, calendula and red campion.

• String or cotton

The method is like making a French plait, start with a few stems, begin to plait them and then keep adding more stems into it each time you plait. The plait holds the flowers together. Once the plait of flowers is long enough, tie the ends together to make the crown. I will definitely be making lots more flower crowns.

Gifts don’t just have to be for teachers, I have gifted many bunched of flowers this year (not ideal when trying to figure out if I could start a flower farm!) but the joy of seeing people reaction when they receive them is worth it.

I also made a special posy of flowers for my daughter to celebrate the end of nursery. I used the first dahlia flower of the year (which came from the plant she bought me for my birthday), calendula and sweet peas. All in hues of pink, yellow and orange. I also made her elderflower and wild strawberry cupcakes, the recipe for which are below.

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Elderflower and wild strawberry cupcakes

Ingredients

• 235g plain flour

• 2 tsp baking powder

• 180g caster sugar

• 150g oat milk

• 80g vegan yoghurt (I used coconut)

• 60ml olive oil

• 1 tbsp apple cider vinegar

• 3 tbsp elderflower cordial

• 80g wild strawberries

For the icing

• 10g freeze dried strawberries, blitzed into a powder

• 100g vegan butter

• 200g icing sugar

• 1 tbsp elderflower cordial

• 1 tsp vanilla extract

Method

1. Preheat your oven to 180C and line a muffin tin with paper cases.

2. Mix all of the ingredients together, apart from the wild strawberries, until smooth.

3. Gently fold in the wild strawberries, so not to crush them.

4. Place two tablespoons of the batter into each muffin cases.

5. Bake for 25 minutes then place onto a cooling rack.

6. Once the cupcakes are cool make the frosting by adding all of the ingredients into a freestanding mixer bowl and mix for 5-10 minutes until light and fluffy.

7. Place into a piping bag and ice the cupcakes or just spread the frosting on with a pallet knife.

8. Enjoy!

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Thank you for reading this newsletter. If you are new here, I hope you will look forward to more posts like this, to subscribers of old, thank you for sticking with me.

To summarise, I hope that people will remember the kindness, thought and tenderness that I try to live my life by, shown through acts like gifting homegrown flowers and baking wonderful homemade treats. That would make me very happy.

Next week I am on holiday to the Lake District so my post might be a little later than usual, depending on if I manage to find time to write.

A quick reminder that my offer for 20% off my annual subscription will end on the 30th June so just a few days left to take advantage of it.