Every year around early April, my family's property becomes carpeted in violets for approximately one week, give or take a few days. And every year, this is one of my favorite and most-anticipated weeks of the entire year. Just setting foot into the back yard during "violet week" is enough to knock your nose on its metaphorical ass, in a fantastic way. The scent is captivating. Unfortunately, the violets are very ephemeral, leading me in the past few years to start looking for ways to prolong their amazing presence. On the bright side: they are edible.
Last year, I gathered quite a few violets and candied them, a simple but time-consuming process involving dipping them in hot sugar water (aka "syrup"), coating them with confectioners sugar, removing their stems, and letting them set. This was tasty, but I found that they did not want to dry out all the way and would get soggy the moment I put them into a tupperware for storage even after they'd been sitting out for days. These are the kind of thing that would put a really fancy cake or cupcake over the top of the awesomeness threshold if used as edible decoration, but by themselves they are perhaps too small and I found that they actually dried out my mouth after eating just a couple.
This year I decided to try something different: homemade violet liqueur.
Violet Week 2014 was gross. By gross, I mean that it was 40 degrees and rainy. My intention was to pluck my violets before noon, as I've heard is best to do when using flowers for eating purposes for optimal scent and flavor. I wanted to wait for a clear, calm day to do this, but the day I ended up biting the dreary, frigid bullet on was already a few days into Violet Week, meaning I had no way of knowing how much longer they'd be around. So I took action. Cold, cold action.
I gathered about four cups of violets before my hands became too numb to work, or else I would have liked to gather several quarts. Now, you'll notice that I am gathering them from a fairly wooded area. I realize that wildlife walks around those areas, and while there is no way to guarantee absolutely pure and untouched violets, several factors gave me cause to go ahead anyway. First, the violets had only just opened up two or three days prior, leaving not a huge amount of time for animals to have trod on them after they opened up considering the vast quantities of violets everywhere. Second, it had been raining steadily for days, which meant they had been rinsed to some degree. Third, I would be steeping them in 80-proof vodka shortly, which would kill most if not all microorganisms that happened to be hanging out on any given violet flower. Still, I steered clear of spots where there were visible animal pellets, and I also gave the flowers a rinse myself after collecting them.
Then came the steeping. I tried to research the heck out of this process, but the internet was quite a let down in this case. I couldn't find much information, so I cobbled together pieces of a few different methods people had written about and created a recipe that suited my endeavor.
After stemming all of the violets (a longer process than the actual picking of the violets) I took 2 cups of the four I had gathered and put them into a pint-sized mason jar, to which I then added enough 80-proof vodka to cover the flowers and shook the jar vigorously every so often. One recipe I had found recommended against steeping them for too long or else the end product would taste less floral and more "vegetal," so with that in mind I strained this first round of violets after six hours. I repeated this procedure with the other 2 cups of violets (using the same vodka, of course) except I decided that it was not worth it for me to get out of bed at 1 in the morning to strain the violets, so I let it go for 12 hours instead of 6 (and it turned out just fine, no "vegetal" weirdness to speak of).
So now I had violet-infused vodka. It was a lovely deep purple color at first, but it turned brownish after a few weeks, which didn't disturb me because it still tastes fine, and also that seems like a pretty natural thing that happens to fruit and vegetables when they are cut up or masticated and exposed to oxygen. It's just oxidation. Actually, it makes me wonder what kind of coloring they must add to commercial violet liqueurs to make them be a uniform and consistent shade of purple. Bleh, food additives.
I have since added approximately 1/4 cup of homemade simple syrup to my violet vodka. It still doesn't really resemble a liqueur, and I think I need to do more research on what makes liqueur liqueur. But it does make a great mixer, especially with citrus flavors which beautifully balance it's intense sweetness. It also smells like Violet Week. :)
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