Spring has made a short appearance here in Germany and though it is cold and rainy the trees are green and the plants are blooming. When you stroll along a lilac bush you cannot help but enjoy that sweet scent. So what if you could bottle that scent of sweet spring and even better mix it with your preferred bubbly?! That would be awesome and that’s why I’m doing it! Ladies and Gents we are making lilac syrup!
Ingredients
- 12 bushel of lilacs (see below for photo of one bushel)
- 2 liters (2 quarts) of water
- 1500g of sugar (53 ounces, 6.6 cups also see our conversion chart here)
- 20 grams of citric acid (check the “preserving” isle)
You also need a funnel, a sieve with cheese cloth or cloth diaper and several clean screw-top glass containers.
Method
1. In a large pot boil together the water and sugar, let the sugar dissolve and let the plain syrup cool.
2. Pull lilac blooms of the bushels (no wooden parts) and make sure you don’t have (too many) critters in your blooms 😉
3. Mix the flowers into the cold syrup, add the citric acid and stir all together.
4. Place the lid onto the pot and let the mixture sit in a cool and dark place for about a week. Stirring about once a day.
5. Now, strain the flowers from the syrup using a sieve and cloth and then filling it with a funnel into the prepared bottles or jars.
Enjoy with your favorite kind of liquid (water, seltzer, prosecco, milk…maybe not coffee…but try it, it might work 😉 ) PS. This flower here would be what I call one bushel of lilacs, there might be a botanical term for it, but I’m too lazy to google that 🙂
So tell me, what gives you spring feelings?
Dani!
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Amy says
Wow, this looks great! It is different from most of the lilac syrup recipes out there in that it does NOT call for heating the flowers at all, which in my experience makes the syrup bitter and vegetal. I will definitely have to try your method!
Erika says
In English, a bushel is a large unit of measurement — 35 liters! I think what you mean here would be a “sprig” or maybe a “bunch.”
Great recipe though! I will try it next year.
Donna Soutar Bilan says
When the recipe called for 12 bushels, I envisions 12 bushel baskets of flowers and thought that seems excessive. Now that it’s been determined it’s really only 12 stalks of flower clusters looking forwards to attempting.
Lisa Julia says
i agree that results are so much better if the liquid COOLS before adding the lilacs. Once my syrup is made, i add some of it to some gin. It helps increase the shelf life and i also store it in the fridge!
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