Dear Reader,
one morning I found myself in the woods.
The lush green canopies of the trees filtering out the sunlight (which was slowly but surely working up to its full noonday potential). The stream gurgling happily along the path, strengthened by last night’s rain. The dew glimmering like diamonds on a patch of horse-tails.
I spied a dipper milling about by the stream and, as any proper amateur ornithologist should, promptly exclaimed „It’s a dipper! Oh my, oh my, oh my!“, thus spooking the bird.
Delightful.
I saw the deep bark ridges of mature Douglas Firs. I whispered to each one its true name: „Pseudotsuga menziesii. Then the patterns changed on my face, and I looked up to see deciduous leaves fluttering in a distant wind; they were from various broadleaf tree species, but most of them were Red Alders. „Alnus rubra,“ I said to them. And there were also some Bigleaf Maples. A Bigleaf Maple leaf caught the wind and whirled down toward me, landing near my feet. I picked up the leaf and spoke to it. „Acer macrophylum,“ I said quietly to it. I tucked the leaf in my pocket. Then as I kept walking, I found that I was in the middle of a group of Western Red Cedards, and as I touched them, I said their name too: „Thuja plicata.“ I said its true name to each one of them as I stroked their red flavored bark.
Remembering March’s walk, I tried to name the trees I met along my path.
„Those ones over there are Birch. Am I right?“ said Uncle Mike. He pointed at three small trees immediately ahead. I looked at the triplet of trees closely. They had grayish-whitish bark and green leaves and the last remnant of one leftover blossom. They were obviously deciduous, which means trees whose leaves die every year, and then the tree pushes fresh growth out every spring.“
… and the heavy branches of the Oak came clear to my mind, flowing out of the central trunk like arteries growing from a solid heart.
A full-sized Chestnut could be measured as twenty-five feet all the way around – if you measured straight through, that would be ten feet through. And there were thousands and thousands of these trees. Even in my grandfather’s photos, people are like little dwarves next to a Chestnut.
If you would like to assemble a sweet herbarium of your own, Add 50 g of chilled butter, 1 1/4 cup of flour, a tablespoon of sugar, and a pinch of salt to a bowl. With your fingertips rub the butter into the flour until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs.
Add 2-3 tablespoons of cold water and knead lightly until the mixture comes together (add a bit more water if necessary). Shape the dough into a disc, cover and chill in the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes. While your dough is resting, go for a walk in the woods or the park and gather some samples (be careful to not touch anything poisonous or irritating!).
Trace your samples on some paper and cut out the leaf shapes. These will be you stencils for the cookies.
Roll the dough out about 3-5 mm thick. Place stencils onto the dough and cut around it to make leaf shaped cookies. Gather remaining dough, roll it out again, and repeat the process.
Bake at 200 °C for about 15 minutes until the cookies turn brown about the edges.
For the icing, mix about 100 g of powdered sugar, two teaspoons of lemon juice, two tablespoons of golden syrup, a teaspoon of green tea powder and a few spoons of water. To check the consistency of the icing drizzle some of it from a spoon back into the bowl. If the line of icing takes a few seconds to sink back into the whole mass, great! If the icing is a bit too liquid, add more powdered sugar; if it is too thick, add some more water.
I divided my icing into two parts and added some spirulina powder to make a darker shade of green to match some of the leaves better.
Place a dollop of icing onto a cookie and smooth it out to the edges.
To make my leaves more detailed, I mixed some of the icing with a bit of water and more of the green tea and spirulina powders to produce a less pasty dark green „paint“ which i used to draw the veins. Try matching the patterns of the leaf samples you have collected for a more realistic look.
And here we are, your very own sweet herbarium.
Have fun exploring!
Yours, brimming with curiosity,
B.
Book info:
Author: Ned Hayes
Title: The Eagle Tree
Year: 2016
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