Infused Sugar

At its core, its a pretty simple project - grab some sugar, and add stuff to it to make it taste yummy! These are the the medium and large sizes of sugar we offer: lavender, rose (my personal fav!!), and mint.

The most common thing we hear is "what in the world do you use it for?"  The answer is....anything you would use regular sugar for!  In tea, lemonade, coffee, as a garnish for beverages, in baking; as a sugar cookie coating, or in batter, as a garnish for all manner of baked goods....you get the idea!

These are the small size jars - cute little taster sets of mint, rose, and lavender.  As we sorta mentioned before, I'm obsessed with packaging, and it's important to me that everything be as cute to look at, as it is to use!

I have a terrible thing to confess, however.  I cannot for the life of me, read - let alone write - a crochet pattern.  It's one of my major life goals right now to learn how to write crochet patterns so I can share my projects!  I've made a bit of progress (sorta) figuring out the Japanese crochet charting method. 

The sugars

Rose:
-sugar, rose petals.  As you mix up the sugar, the rose petals will get kinda mushed up, and will turn the sugar a soft, pale pink.  (Which is part of why it's so awesome!)  Put the whole thing into an airtight container and shake every day for a couple of weeks, to mix around the flavor, and to make sure none of the sugar sticks together.  This is particularly important for the rose, as the water content is pretty high, and can cause your sugar to get lumpy pretty easily.  When packaging, it's a good idea to use a strainer to get out the larger chunks of rose petals, and any sugar lumps.  I kind of like the little flakes in the final product, but the big petal chunks are a bit too much.   :)

Lavender:
-sugar & culinary lavender (my lavender plants haven't started producing yet!)  This is the driest of the sugars, and really doesn't require as much attention, but you still want to shake it up every once in a while to mix the flavors around.

Mint:
-raw sugar, mint leaves.  Fortunately, Melia has a mint plant that is quite the producer.  (My mint had a hard time this year for some reason....)  A couple of things to note about the mint - while the leaves are super pungent when you pick them, we've found that we've had to use far, far more than we ever would have guessed.  It could be partly because the raw sugar overpowers the mint, as well as the mint not having quite as much lingering aroma as the lavender & rose.  We've added more mint leaves a few different times to get the right level of flavor.



I think next up for us is to do some citrus sugars - how delicious would it be to have lemon-sugar sugar cookies??  We'll let you know how that experiment goes....

It's all a guessing game - and it doesn't hurt to keep adding fresh leaves (or petals, or buds) until you get the flavor you want.  (or mix and match flavors!) And you can always add more sugar if the flavor is too strong!