A Tale of Two Sorbets

One day while scanning Slashfood I came across a picture of a Korean watermelon flavoured popsicle with chocolate chips for seeds and I knew immediately that I had to try it. Unfortunately, I’m not in Korea and so my watermelon popsicle tasting was going to have to wait. It seemed like it was possible that one day I’d end up in Korea and would get to try this wonderful watermelon concoction so I wasn’t too disappointed. A friend of mine is teaching in Korea right now so that gives me even more reason to go. She’s currently teaching English to kindergarten kids and when she told me they call her Teacher Barbie and Pretty Snowman I almost bought a plane ticket, if only so they could call me Brilynn Teacher Barbie. Then fate intervened in the form of a new cookbook. As I often do with cookbooks, I opened it up and flipped immediately to the desserts section where I spied the most glorious title ever: Watermelon Sorbet with Chocolate Chips. It was exactly what I had been wanting to try and it fell right into my lap. You can all thank my amazing friend Tara for this recipe as she is the one who bought me the book. And you can thank Helen of Tartelette for the inspiration to serve the sorbet in lemon cups. Seriously, that girl comes up with the best ideas.

Watermelon Sorbet with Chocolate Chips (from Masterclass in Italian Cooking by Maxine Clark)

750g/1lb 10oz skinned, cubed watermelon

300g/10oz/1 ¼ cups superfine sugar

1 cinnamon stick

Freshly squeezed juice of 2 lemons

1 egg white

125g/4 ½ oz chocolate chips, (I cut my own chunks)

Remove the seeds from the melon. Liquidize the melon, then, with the machine running, pour in the sugar and blend for about 30 seconds.

Pour the melon mixture into a saucepan and add the cinnamon stick. Slowly bring to a boil, stirring all the time to completely dissolve the sugar, then turn down the heat and simmer for 1 minute. Remove from heat, remove the cinnamon stick, add the lemon juice and cool.

Freeze in an ice cream maker and when half frozen, lightly whisk the egg white and add with the machine running. Stir in the chocolate chips at the end of the cycle.

To make serving extra pretty, serve in hollowed out lemon halves.

One sorbet is never enough and so I’m giving you two. I needed to make a gluten free dessert one night to accommodate a dinner party guest and I’m not gonna lie, I really didn’t know what that entailed. I count my blessings everyday that I’m not one of those unfortunate souls who has a food allergy or dietary restrictions. However, because of that, I had no clue what kind of dessert I could make that would be safe for the gluten free guest to eat. As usual, the internet came to my rescue and I perused a ton of gluten free blogs and armed myself with knowledge before ultimately deciding to do my own thing. I had been contemplating a sorbet from the get go, but the problem was that I didn’t have enough of any one kind of fruit to make a single flavour of sorbet. Luckily, pretty much all fruit goes together so I gathered up the remnants of fruit strewn about my kitchen counters and made a super sorbet that combined everything I had. This resulted in a brightly coloured and flavoured sorbet that was much appreciated by the gluten free and non-gluten free guests alike.

Bri’s Super Sorbet

2 bananas

1 small mango

1 orange, juiced, reserve peel

1 lime, juiced, reserve peel

½ quart strawberries

1 cup raspberries

¼ cup Malibu liqueur

1 ½ cups water

1 ½ cups sugar

Combine water, sugar, orange and lime peels in a sauce pan and bring to a boil, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Let simmer 10 minutes. Remove from heat and strain out the peel.

Combine everything in a blender and blitz it until smooth. My beautiful K-tec blender makes it so smooth that straining isn’t necessary, if you’re not so fortunate, then strain the resulting mixture.

Chill the mixture and then freeze according to your ice cream manufacturers’ directions.

Technorati Tags:

Sorbet + Fruit + Watermelon