When I think about foods like blue cheese or even something simple like meringue, I always wonder how people came to invent these recipes. How did someone know to leave cheese to age for a few years or beat egg whites for a long time and then bake it? Well a few nights ago I had a similar revelation: I stumbled across how to make a really great sorbet.It started with a long day of uni work, coming home spent and having to push on into the night. I needed a raspberry smoothie. Bad. I blended raspberries, ice cubes, icing sugar and fruit juice together and found that it had the texture (if not a bit softer) of sorbet. Then I remembered from an episode of The Naked Chef that sorbet is essentially frozen sugar and water. Man am I glad I made a smoothie that night, because I never knew making sorbet was this simple!
So now that I don't have back-to-back assignments, I decided to make it again tonight with some adjustments. I added a thick sugar syrup with glucose so that it'd hold and it'd have that lovely thick texture of mango sorbet. I've got to say, I am really happy with this recipe so I hope you guys enjoy!Raspberry Sorbet
2 milk glasses of ice cubes (smoothie measurements!)
1 milk glass of raspberries
½ cup sugar
¼ water
1 cinnamon quill
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 tablespoon glucose
Icing sugar to taste
Place sugar, water, cinnamon, vanilla extract and glucose in a saucepan over medium heat. Bring to the boil then simmer for 5 minutes. Remove from heat, take out the cinnamon quill and cool completely.
Place ice, raspberries and sugar syrup in a blender. Blend until smooth.
Depending on the sweetness of the raspberries, you may want to add icing sugar for extra sweetness.
Set in a shallow dish in the freezer overnight.
Toffee Shell
½ cup sugar
Lightly grease the backs of metal tablespoons.
Heat the sugar over medium-low heat until the it liquifies and colours slightly. Remove from heat. Cool until you can make ribbons on the surface.
Drizzle over the spoons in criss-cross patterns.
Cool the spoons in the freezer for a minute and gently remove toffee from spoon.
Set aside at room temperature.
Mould the sorbet with two tablespoons and fit the toffee shell onto one side. Serve with creme fraiche and candied lime zest. It's creamy, sweet, fruitily refreshing and the toffee adds a crunch to it.
