Sugared Primulas

By Mel Evans

Wild Primroses, cultivated Primroses and Polyanthus are part of the Primula family. Although professional foragers debate which are tastiest, they are all edible.

Cultivated Primroses come in all sorts of colours.

Polyanthus have a number of flowers on one long stem, unlike Primroses.

This year has been a fantastic year for Wild Primroses as they have benefited from the mild wet Winter we experienced.

Wild Primroses are in abundance right now.

We don’t generally advocate picking wild flowers, but you may have the cultivated form in your garden.. You might even have some in the house or in a window box.

We love using flowers in our Forest School sessions and I try to grow flowers to use. Obviously they all have to be taste safe or better still edible! Last year I planted lots of Primulus to use in Forest School sessions. They are looking beautiful right now, so we decided to have a go at sugaring some.

This is a Victorian technique of preserving flowers and sugared Primulas make the perfect decoration for an Easter cake.

The technique is really very simple. You pick your blooms, shaking each one to get any bugs out. Then you get together some eggs, caster sugar, tea spoons and a pastry brush.

We sieved our sugar so it was really fine and separated the eggs.

Next we dipped the flowers in the lightly whisked egg whites and painted it onto the back of the petals with a brush. The flowers then got coated in sugar using the tea spoon.

The flowers then need to be laid out in a warm place to dry. We put ours in a sunny room near the window and they dried in a few hours. Initially the flowers were laid out on a piece of baking parchment, however as they dried they felt like they might stick. We transferred half the flowers onto a clean piece of parchment and half onto a cooling rack. We found the ones on the parchment dried flatter, but were more prone to sticking than those on the rack. Both resulted in some nicely preserved flowers however. It is worth keeping an eye on the flowers as they dry and moving them around if they feel like they might stick.

Once your flowers are dry its up to you how you use them. You could bake cupcakes or biscuits, but we went for a Victoria Sponge as it seemed most fitting for our Victorian flowers!