I have to love my husband who loves to give practical gifts. Usually he stays away from gifting flowers because they last for a few days before they’re composted. However, there are so many uses for not just roses but other flowers as well. While I’m going to be talking about roses here, there are so many other flowers that can be used in the exact same way!
For those who are unaware, roses are edible. (Before you do eat rose petals, make sure that they haven’t been sprayed with chemicals, pesticides, insecticides, or anything else that is harmful to you.) Roses contain vitamins A & C, Niacin, Potassium, Iron, Calcium, and Phosphorus. Some places where you’ll find fresh petals are on a dessert/cake or in beverages such as teas.
It’s not just the petals that are usable to our bodies. Rose hips (the bulb at the bottom of bud, harvested at the end of the rose season from the rose bush) is used in the beauty industry and baby products for the benefits it has to the skin.
The benefits to the skin is the primary reason why I decided from this last bouquet of roses that was given to me that I was going to use the petals for my next batch of soap.
I started making soap because I’m not okay with all the chemicals that are being used in soaps in the commercial market. Other than using soap dyes (which I’ve had my tub and skin discolored from bath bombs and other products) the mission I’m on is finding natural dyes to color my soap. For pink soap, I’ve seen soap makers use dyes or French clay.
Now Calendula is a well known floral natural food grade colorant. For red/pink colorant, Beets can be used in food. But anyone who’s worked with beets knows that your skin and clothes can be discolored. So I wanted to find a different red/pink colorant for my soap that I can grow in my garden. So I came to roses.
How to Process Roses
There’s two easy ways of doing this.
The first is to hang the roses upside down to slowly dry them out. The benefit of this method is that all the vitamins and natural compounds that our bodies benefit from are at a higher concentration when they are dried at a low temperature and slowly.
Ideally, the most benefit would come from using the petals fresh. And while it is possible to use fresh ingredients in soap making (I make orange colored soap using pumpkin puree), there’s no way of breaking down the petals for a smooth and consistent colorant unless you want to use a blender and puree it with the water content of your soap. While it’s not a bad idea, unless you grow roses year round (which I don’t) you have a limited supply due to the window of fresh flowers available. (This is the reason why dried petals are best for me.)
This drying method is slow and takes time. Also any white component will yellow as it dries out. This can affect your over all final color depending on which rose you use. With the red rose, not so much. But the other two, the tinge will be noticible.
So there’s the second method, using a dehydrator.
The benefit from using a dehydrator is that petals are finished drying in about 24 hours (at 90°F, the lowest setting on my dehydrator) and their colors are only affected by growing darker.
As you can see here, the white component on the pink flowers have not discolored too much. This is great because when I turn these petals to powders, I’ll retain a pink like quality.
Before I move on to finishing these petals, I want to mention that if you want to make a natural confetti for cake decorations or throwing for a party/wedding celebration, all that you need to do is crush your dried petals by hand and store them in an air tight container (like a lidded glass jar) to prevent them from rehydrating due to humidity in the air.
As you can guess, with the fact that there were lavender inner petals on the second rose (the one with the variegated pink and white outer flowers), this is the reason why I blended in the red petals with the pink ones, to keep the pink and stop the transitiontoward purple (although I’m not opposed to purple soap.)
To make Rose Powder, all you need to do is put the crushed petals into a coffee or herb grinder and run it until you get the consistency that you are looking for. Because I’m looking to make a colorant for my soap and don’t want to have flower chunks in it, I took the powder down to a very fine grind.
The fun part about Rose Powder is that you’re not limited to use it as a natural dye or colorant. You could dust this on the icing of a confectionary dessert. If you want to make pink pasta, use this powder as part of your dry ingredients. Mix the powder with a sugar or salt and you have a pink sugar or salt rim to your favorite beverage.
No matter what celebration you have coming up, keep this idea in mind. If you want to dress put your Easter cup you can make a sugar rim using all sorts of different colored edible flowers. Calendula gives you yellow/orange, Violets blue/purple, Hibiscus yellow/orange/pink/blue/purple, there are so many other flowers. If you want to see a quick list of different edible flowers, here’s a jumping of point here.
How I Can Do That 
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