Wild Rose Petal Jam

My daughter loved making honeysuckle jelly with me recently, but we were both a little disappointed with the flavor. So we tried again, this time with rose petals from this wild rosebush.
The results were truly wonderful. The flowers were fragrant (though not powerful in the way some roses can be) and the flavor carried through the cooking process into the final product.

From surfing the web for recipes, we came up with the following method, which worked great! We learned that almost all roses are edible, you can work with what you've got!

We collected rose petals from our untreated wild roses. I wish we'd had pink ones for more color, but in our case, white had to do. I recommend child labor for the collecting of the petals, as it's sort of tedious. She spent almost two hours, I helped for some of the time. That was the hardest part of the whole process, and it was a pleasant time chatting about the recipes we'd found and should we use white wine in place of some of the water? Add rose water? Those are some of the ideas we came across online. We settled on a 'plain' recipe for this first try.

 Ingredients

2 cups rose petals (measured before washing, it may have been a little less).
2 cups sugar
2 cups water
1 tsp lemon juice
8 Tbsp powdered classic pectin
(UPDATE as of 9/2013: Use less! I think there was something wrong with the jar of pectin I used. Start with 4 and see how it goes. I have switched to Pomona's for more consistent results)

Method
Wash rose petals. If using large roses, you're supposed to cut the thicker white base off the petals, but as we were using tiny wild roses, it wasn't practical or necessary.

Before

After

Coat the rose petals with 1 cup of the sugar, and refrigerate overnight, covered. See how it macerated? The smell when we uncovered it was amazing.

The next day, bring the water to a boil. Add the rose petals and sugar mixture and let steep for a while. Meanwhile, mix the pectin with the other cup of sugar. Put the pot back on the stove and add the sugar/pectin mix and lemon juice. Word of caution here - using more lemon juice may make for safer food preservation, but it will overwhelm the flower flavor quickly. Your call. Boil for a few minutes until it starts to gel a little. You can test the gelling by dripping a little on a cold plate.
 
We ladled this into hot 4oz jars that had been sterilized in boiling water right until they were filled. We sterilized the ladle, too, by dipping it into boiling water. You can process the jars in a water bath for 10 minutes if you want the extra peace of mind, but we didn't. This recipe made 10 small jars and all sealed up fine. The jam looks sort of honey golden in color. We think it would be extremely pretty with pink roses.