1. Zucchini flowers
Swap your bouquet for these cheesy fillers and your head and heart will be in sync. The zucchini is a perfect vehicle for stuffing and this filler of truffle pecorino is ready to bat.
Stuffed zucchini flowers Source: Sharyn Cairns
2. Orange blossom
Who doesn’t love the swooning moment of biting into freshly baked baklava with its golden layers of pastry, spiced nuts and fragrant syrup? This Armenian version gets you brewing your cinnamon and clove, before adding orange blossom and rosewater to create a sweet syrup.
Armenian baklava Source: Sharyn Cairns
3. Banana blossom
Served raw, banana blossoms lend crunch to all sorts of South-East Asian salads, including this Thai favourite. To prepare this flower, remove the coloured outer leaves until you reach the pale heart, similar to the way you prepare globe artichokes.
Source: Chris Chen
4. Pumpkin
Pumpkin flowers are used mainly in central and southern Vietnamese cooking. They can be tossed into salads, stir-fried, put in a clear soup, or stuffed and flash-fried - like these prawn and dill stuffed poppers.
Pumpkin flowers stuffed with prawn and dill Source: Alan Benson
5. Blue pea flower
The intense blue colour of the butterfly blue pea flower is so mesmerising - when dried flowers are steeped in hot water, they release their beautiful colour. Here, it's used in Thai-style dumplings - make the dough and add the colour, and then a delicious vegetable filling - and they'll pop on your plate and straight into your mouths.
Blue pea flower dumplings Source: Sharyn Cairns
6. Chamomile
Ready for a healthy jelly? The gelatin in these delicious jellies is great for gut health, and the chamomile and manuka honey are also brilliant at soothing the digestive system and balancing gut bacteria.
Source: Jordanna Levin
7. Rose petal
A few teaspoonfuls of rosewater, a handful of pistachios and a scattering of rose petals elevate this simple cream-filled sponge to something exotically redolent of a Persian flower garden.
Rose and pistachio cake Source: Bloomsbury
8. Starflower
Quinoa is one of Peru’s staple foods and is as healthy as it is versatile. If available garnish this bowl of quinoa, ginger, coriander and baby onions with borage flowers, but you can also use other edible flowers or your favourite seasonal herbs.
Source: Erik Andia Pomar
9. Lavender
Summertime sings in this quick and easy salad of peaches and endive tossed with honey, red wine vinegar and topped with pesticide-free lavender flowers.
10. Nasturtiums
Easy to whip up and quite the looker, this creamy breakfast pudding of raspberry, rosewater, chia and pistachio have never looked better, especially when topped with edible flowers - Snap Dragons, Nasturtiums and Marigolds all work beautifully in these pots of gold.
Source: Benito Martin
11. Pineapple flowers
This banana cream cheese frosting on this hummingbird cake is sublime! While the pineapple flowers do take some time to dry out, they don’t require much effort. at all. For best results, the flowers of a riper pineapple will have a better, brighter colour and dehydrate more rapidly.
Hummingbird layer cake with pineapple flowers Source: Chris Middleton
12. Hibiscus
Quesadillas are always the answer. With a mixture of queso fresco and criollo cheese and homemade tortillas, it is only fitting that they get their own vibrant salsa kicker - and this one uses dried hibiscus flowers, chopped dates and sherry vinegar.
file:9983_sbs-quesadillas-with-zucchini-flowers.jpg
BONUS: Ginger flowers
Unlike the more well-known coconut-milk based curry laksa, the base broth in this Assam laksa is made from fish, tamarind and torched ginger flowers, resulting in a lovely, sour, fragrant soup. Served with chewy, translucent noodles and garnished with the lively flavours of fresh pineapple, cucumber, red onion, torch ginger and shrimp molasses.
Source: China Squirrel
