Shopping for Flower Flavours

Whenever I go to Toulouse I try to visit a good épicerie and stock up on violettes de Toulouse, crystallised flowers, not the violet-flavoured sweets. These are very good, as are the guimauves à la violette, violet-flavoured marshmallows. Last time I was there I also bought sirop de violette, knowing that I would never find myself with enough fresh violets to make a bottle of violet syrup. The flavour was subtle, but the colour seemed to have been ruined by an overdose of blue food colouring. The first time I made violet ice-cream the result was an unappetising blue. Subsequently I tempered the mixture with red food colouring, and that produced, in my view, the right shade. Reading Hannah Glasse and other eighteenth-century authors, however, it would appear that one of the uses of violet syrup was in fact to colour desserts blue.