Day 10: Ladies bedstraw in milk chocolate

Ladies bedstraw, Gallium arvensis

This is a lovely midsummer meadow plant, with delicate spires of tiny yellow flowers.  It has a lovely clovery smell of honey when you bring it to your nose, and this intensifies as it is dried - so a favoured stuffing for mattresses in years gone by - hence the name!  It has medicinal uses as well, and was reported to be used as a vegetarian rennet for cheesemaking - giving it it's old Scots name of 'keeslip' (Tess Darwin, The Scots Herbal).  The root was used to create a red dye, and there is an account in Tess Darwin's book of concern expressed in the late eighteenth century of the disappearance of the plant from the machair in Barra due to overexploitation, as the roots grew much bigger in the sandy soil and so was much sought after.

I first tried this flower as a flavour in July 2017 - struck on gathering the flowers at how honeyed their scent was.  The infusion is good, but in addition to the honey there is a bitterness which makes the whole flavour remind me of an Italian honey I tried once that was mainly made from Chestnut flowers.  It takes a moment to get over the surprise of the bitter edge to the taste, but actually grows on you quite rapidly.

So its first chocolate outing with me was as a ganache, but for this Advent chocolate, we have ground the dried flowers and leaves into a wonderful 55% milk chocolate, using Honduran origin cocoa beans made by Glasgow-based Bare Bones.