Rose Sugar and other things.......

I'm currently losing about 3 hours a day, as I take time to visit my mother in hospital. This is time that I would normally spend cooking or gardening. Consequently, the garden is over-run with weeds - although we have found time to harvest most of the vegetables that are ready to eat - and our meals are basic, to say the least. I'm not sure if things will improve much when mother is out of hospital, as I can't judge yet how much care she will need.

I have been baking a little, but it's old favourites rather than new recipes - I just don't have time to look for anything new! I've made the mayonnaise-based brownies and Dan Lepard's Marmalade Flapjacks and I've been thinking about this month's We Should Cocoa challenge - to use roses in conjunction with chocolate.

I'm not very inspired by this challenge - I'm certainly not going to spend over £4 on 4 tablespoons of rose water, which probably won't get used again once a few drops are taken out, and any other rose-based products are even less readily available or more expensive, when the postage costs of online buying are factored in! However, I do (or did) intend to attempt the challenge, and to this end, I've been trying to make rose sugar. I've had two attempts so far and neither seem very promising.

Both attempts were made the same way - rub the petals of one large, just opened, rose (either fresh or dried for two days) with 100g of caster sugar and store in a closed container. The sugar made with dried flowers (on the right in the photo) looks good, as it has flecks of dark pink petals throughout, but it smells awful - nothing like roses! The sugar made using fresh rose petals (in the left container) still smells like roses, but the petals have lost their colour and gone a nasty yellowy-brown colour! The sugar is also damp and lumpy, so I can't even sieve out the manky petals with the sugar like this.

I'm not sure what to do next - any suggestions? I'm inclined to use the sugar made with fresh petals and hope the smell survives the cooking process, as neither sugars seem to have taken on any additional flavour from the rose petals!  Perhaps I could sieve out the dry petals from the other sugar and hope the colour of those survives cooking too! But first I have to find time to make something!