Cooking with roses gives food mysterious, exotic notes

Roses are typically what lovers give to the person they are wooing and present on bended knee when they propose (although not in my experience); poets declare that their "love is like a red, red rose"; while virginal brides (and those pretending to be) carry white roses down the aisle to symbolise their purity.

In cuisine, edible roses add a mysterious, exotic fragrance and flavour to dishes - use judiciously, though, or the food will taste and smell like soap.

The easiest way to use rose is in the form of rosewater, a distillate made from petals, and syrup (the flowers simmered with sugar and water), both of which are available commercially. Rosewater and rose syrup are concentrated solutions and a little goes a long way in dishes such as rice pudding, baklava and gulab jamuns.

Whether using fresh or dried roses, it's essential the flowers haven't been sprayed with pesticides, insecticides and other harmful products - so that rules out stealing flowers from parks and other people's gardens (which you shouldn't be doing anyway). You can buy dried roses from many shops that carry a good array of teas.

In an attempt to make a home-made version of the Mandarin Oriental's excellent strawberry and rose petal jam, I cooked strawberries with sugar and the outer leaves of dried rosebuds - the outer leaves are the only ones with a nice red colour (when dried, the inner leaves are brown) - then mixed in dried apple pectin, fresh lemon juice and some rosewater. I didn't add enough pectin (or didn't cook it long enough), so the mixture turned into strawberry-rose sauce, rather than a jam, but the flavour was very good. I also use dried rose petals in a complex spice mixture known as ras el hanout. Or grind the petals with granulated sugar in a food processor, then store the mixture in an airtight glass jar - the rose sugar can be sprinkled over ladyfinger biscuits and sugar cookies before they're baked.