Elderflower champagne

Edible flowers are terribly exciting and trendy at the moment. A dash of green alkanet in your salad, or some fried courgette flowers are great fun. But even this takes second place to making your own bubbly from the fat white disk-like elderflowers which are popping open in English hedgerows. Once you find a bush in bloom, it should take you only a few minutes to pick enough flowerheads for a couple of bottles.

Ingredients:

4 litres water
2 and a half cups caster sugar
8 heads of elderflowers
2 tbsp white wine vinegar
2 lemons

1. Bring the water to the boil in a heavy-bottomed saucepan, and dissolve the sugar in it. Leave to cool.
2. Wash the elderflower heads and remove any large bits of stalk.
3. Juice one of the lemons, and cut the second into fine slices.
4. Add the flowerheads, the lemon slices and juice and the white wine vinegar to the mix.
5. Cover with a slightly damp, clean teatowel, and leave at room temperature for two days. If the mixture is not fermenting (foaming a little and smelling rather happy), then add a pinch of fast-action dried yeast, and leave for another three days to coax it along.
6. Crush the flower heads with a potato masher to release more of the flavour, and strain through a fine sieve.
7. Decant into screw-top bottles, leave for two weeks, before quaffing it, chilled.