Lilac flowers are abundant in my area. Last year I had my heart set on making lilac syrup and ice cream, but I missed my window (lilac season is over in the blink of an eye). If you don’t have lilacs in your area, just know, they smell incredible! The scent is strong, the flowers are pretty, and there is a ton of them nearby.
Now was my chance, prime lilac season! We decided to take Old Man Oats foraging and Oliver to the puppy park. As you can see from the above photo, Oaty is a lazy bear skin rug, but he loves his walks. He’s super calm and Oliver is still young and bouncy. We haven’t got him leashed trained enough to take him foraging, yet. Hence, Oaty went hunting for lilac flowers, and Oliver to the puppy park when we returned.
Here is the haul we came back with. We picked them from a few different trees to avoid over-picking. There were so many flowers, that it likely would have been fine, but I want to forage responsibly.

It took HOURS to pluck all the flowers off the stems (the stems are apparently bitter, or I wouldn’t have bothered).
The recipe I started with was for lilac syrup. First, you start heating sugar and water.
Add a ton of lilacs and simmer for about 5 minutes.
Then let it steep for 3-8 hours (I left it overnight).
The next recipe I made was ice cream (looks pretty eh?). The recipe I chose didn’t add the lilacs until the recipe had cooled. I didn’t want chunks of flowers in my ice cream so I dumped them in to flavour the ice cream this way (like lavender ice cream which I love!). The flowers did turn brown after being exposed to heat, so I see why the recipe creator didn’t add them at this step). I had lots of leftover flowers, so I threw the rest in the pot and let the mixture steep for a few hours.
I strained out the flowers and put the batter in the fridge to cool.
Because I made this into a double batch of ice cream the ice cream maker couldn’t handle it. It didn’t freeze at all. I threw the whole thing in the freezer overnight until it froze solid and then ran the ice cream maker again. Terrible idea. I ran it a really long time, but the texture stayed icy instead of creamy.
Here’s how the syrup turned out after being strained. It was more green than lilac. I was really hoping for a pretty pale purple colour.
All this hard work was for Epic Sunday Breakfast. Sunday breakfast is a big deal for us. You have to go the extra mile and it’s for all of us (pups included). I chose to make waffles with the lilac recipes and have mimosas too. I did not put the lilac syrup in the mimosas, but maybe I should have? Missed opportunity. How did I like the lilac recipes? Sadly, they were meh. Not awful, but not great. I wanted to love them. I didn’t. They were just okay. The lilac flavour didn’t come through very much, even though I added extra flowers and steeped longer than mentioned in the recipes. The ice cream was mostly my fault, I didn’t follow the recipe and I messed up processing it in the ice cream maker, but the lilac flavour wasn’t there. In the future lilacs will be a garnish only.
As for the pups, they didn’t get any of the lilac recipes because I have no idea if lilacs are toxic for dogs. They got waffles with blueberries and maple syrup.
























































