Make Butter The Star Of Your Dinner Party With This Beautiful Flower Trick

Once considered little more than a common cooking fat or toast topping, butter is finally finding its golden place in the sun. Party hosts are literally lighting up the dinner table with butter candles nestled in bread bowls, and serving creative and flavorful bread and butter flights. Some are even taking inspiration from their gardens and serving beautiful boules of butter bespeckled with real flower petals, and even whole blossoms.

Flower-studded butter is fairly easy to make: just gently fold flower petals into softened butter, or press whole blossoms into the outside with a butter mold or plastic wrap. If using a butter mold, choose one with a smooth interior rather than one with an intricate design. In both cases, chill the butter while it's in the mold or cling wrap for several hours to make it easier to demold, to help keep the flowers fresh, and to ensure it holds its shape when served.

You have plenty of edible flowers to choose from. Roses, violets, pansies, hibiscus, and many more flower species are not only edible, they're delicious. Those listed range in flavor from floral and perfumey to grassy with a hint of citrus. These may not sound like the most appealing flavors, but used in the right proportions, their astringence mingles with butter's sunny richness to create deeply nuanced, sophisticated flavor.

The most important details to remember when making floral-pressed butter are flavor and presentation. The best-tasting flowers may not provide the prettiest presentation, while flowers perfect for pressing into the outside of butter may not have the flavor you're looking for. A good example of this is chive flowers versus pansies. 

Chive flowers have a subtle onion or garlic flavor that's delicious infused into butter, but the blossoms are tiny and bloom in a sphere at the end of the stem. Pansies, meanwhile, are excellent for pressing, both in books and into butter, since they're colorful with a lovely shape. However, they're grassy and can lean a bit bitter. The best way to use both is to gently crumble the smaller chive blossoms into butter and mix them through, reserving pansies for decorating the outside of butter.

Similarly, nasturtiums are a little peppery. Hibiscus has a citrus flavor, but its trumpet-shaped blooms aren't good for pressing. Instead, you can snip them into colorful confetti to fold into your butter. You can also harvest a number of beautiful and delicious flowers from your herb garden since most herbs develop flowers that taste a bit like the herb they adorn. Tiny purple basil and thyme flowers are gorgeous mixed into butter, while lacy, creamy, white cilantro flowers are perfect for decorating the outside.