Cooking
Butterfly Pea Simple Syrup (Sugar-Free Option)
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This blue syrup is a homemade simple syrup prepared with the amazing butterfly pea flowers. Deliciously sweet and floral, it’s perfect to give a pop of colour to drinks, desserts, and bakes. Let us show you how to make it!
Simple syrups are traditionally made by boiling down a 1:1 water and sugar solution. This process concentrates the sugar, turning the mixture into a thick and glossy syrup. Super easy!
Here, we used the same method but replaced plain water with a blue pea-infused tea. So the syrup won’t look clear but will have a super pretty blue hue.
Also called blue pea, butterfly pea flowers are edible flowers with vibrant blue-violet petals. They have a sweet and floral taste with slightly earthy and grassy notes, similar to matcha but not as bitter.
Native to Southeast Asia, butterfly pea flowers are widely used in Thai and Malay cuisines for desserts, drinks, and colourful recipes.
Because the petals are rich in blue pigments, they can give the most wonderful blue hue to cakes, cookies, lattes and cheesecakes. And yes, even to a simple sugar syrup!
For this recipe, you’ll need to get dried butterfly pea flowers which you can find at your local Asian food store or online. Then, we’ll show how to use the flowers to prepare the blue pea tea from scratch.
The blue tea will then be the base of the syrup, which you’ll simmer with sugar until glossy and concentrated.
Then, depending on how long you simmer the blue syrup, you can get different consistencies: runny like maple syrup or thick like honey. But don’t worry, we’ll show you exactly how to get one or the other in the steps below!
And once the butterfly pea syrup is ready, the fun begins!
You can drizzle this blue syrup over pancakes and waffles just like you would do with maple syrup. Or why not drizzle it over a spongy blue cake for extra moisture and sweetness?
You can also use this blue pea syrup to prepare fancy cocktails, colourful iced teas, and even a colour-changing lemonade. And another way you can use it is to garnish ice creams, sorbets, and fruit salads. Awesome!
If you’re watching your sugar intake and would like to try a healthier option, check the recipe below and we’ll tell you how to swap sugar with zero-sugar sweetener erythritol.
This way, the syrup will have practically zero calories — totally guilt-free!
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