viola sororia

violets are up all over, bless them, coming up in lawns and woodlots and forests.

i got it into my head that for some event later on in the year i should have some lovely violet simple syrup from which to make soft drinks, so that meant getting down and funky with the back-breaking labor of harvesting thousands of the little blossoms. a friend of mine and her grandson helped me with some of that, but still. it was a lot.



so then after you get a big wad of violets you steep them in freshly boiled water. but you don't BOIL them because you will lose the color.

and what you get is a fantastic teal liquid. fantastic. only for violet syrup you kind of want it to be purple, and you change it back from teal to purple through adding drops of lemon juice because apparently the color is a function of pH.

who knew?

anyway, then you add the sugar until you have simple syrup and you probably want to skip the step where you spill a half cup of it in your kitchen thereby kicking off two days of mopping.

then MB said that id i was going to do all THAT for a tea party i may as well make violet ice cubes wherein a single violet blossom is placed inside an ice cube at its maximum freshness and beauty and as usual MB is right.

there are no pictures of that, though. you have the internet. you can google it if you want to see what the precious little darlings looks like.

yeah, that.