This is a little treat I discovered a few years ago from Jennifer Hahn’s great book, Pacific Feast: A Cook’s Guide to West Coast Foraging and Cuisine. This one requires a bit of skill as you need to collect maple blossoms, which don’t always grow that close to the ground. Being confined to the confines of my neighborhood this year, I found a local tree that had blossoms only seven to eight feet off the ground. I used a long pair of loppers and a bucket to harvest a handful of these blossoms, which are technically referred to as racemes, a bunch of flowers all growing in a cluster.
After harvesting, I took them home and prepared a light tempura batter with cold water, flour and an egg.
I dipped the blossoms in the batter just long enough to cover all of the individual flowers and fried them in hot canola oil. If you’re wondering how hot the oil needs to be to fry something, here’s a quick way to test – put the end of a wooden spoon in the oil and if bubbles form around it, it’s hot enough. If not, wait.
After frying, I let them cool paper towels to soak up the excess oil. I then added some powdered sugar to finish them off.
My wife said the batter should’ve been thicker, but she still ate several. I liked the thinner batter because I could taste more of the flowers themselves. Either way, it’s a great little spring treat and I nice dessert, especially if you’re having company and want to show them something different.