Pixie-slippers
Pixie-Slippers are a tiny native flower, often found in clusters wherever sun reaches the forest floor, or where the grasses are short in fields and lawns.
Appearance and Characteristics
Pixie-Slippers are small, fuzzy looking flowers that look like small puffs of fur or fuzz. Ground hugging plants, small stems rarely longer than two inches sprout from a carpet of flat, thumbnail shaped green leaves. The puffs of flower, half an inch in diameter, come in a rainbow of colors; from reds and oranges to blues and purples and all colors in between, even rare green flowers. Members of the clover family of flowers, each of the small flowers contains a sweet nectar rather attractive to butterflies and other insects. Blooming at the end of spring, the blooms stay active through the summer, constantly producing nectar from the same flower, until they dry up and fade in the fall, eventually curling into a seed and falling away at the end of fall before the winter snow.
Usage
The nectar is harvested with a press not unlike an olive press, though it takes many flowers to generate a bottle-able product. The flowers are separated by color before pressing, resulting in nectar of a cloudy white with a slight tinge of color, whatever color the batch of flowers were. Extremely sweet, very little nectar is needed to sweeten a recipe; if a recipe calls for a teaspoon of sugar, a tenth of a teaspoon of nectar will be equal to the full teaspoon. Most often used to sweeten liquids like tea, 'slipper sweets' are a popular native candy made by mixing the nectar with a starch and coloring, dropping the mixture into small 'dots' on a piece of wax paper to harden. Other uses include using it in mixed drinks, candies, frosting and cookies. It's also not uncommon for the flowers themselves to simply be picked and sucked upon for a burst of sweetness, some even eating the flower itself.