Cranberry-Orange Sorbet

It's fresh cranberry season. What better way to celebrate than to make cranberry sorbet? This is another Perfect Scoop recipe. I didn't have quite enough orange juice, so I added a little water in place of it. This was delicious - tangy and refreshing. I would have liked it a little sweeter (using the full amount of orange juice) but everyone else said it was perfect and they wouldn't want it any sweeter. I still have more cranberries in the fridge, and will probably make this again this week.

Strawberry Frozen Yogurt and Mocha Sherbet

I love having an ice cream maker. It's so fun to make this stuff at home. This week I made two recipes from David Lebovitz's The Perfect Scoop, which I now have renewed twice at my library - I should probably just buy the book already. I made the strawberry frozen yogurt today - I used Dannon plain yogurt. I liked it as much as I liked his strawberry sorbet which I made before; my hubby likes the creaminess of the frozen yogurt better. Maybe next time I will try straining the yogurt to make it a little richer.

Earlier this week I made his mocha sherbet. This is the first one of his recipes that I wasn't that crazy about. Part of it was my fault since I used stale coffee. We aren't coffee drinkers, so the ground coffee I bought last fall for my in-laws when they visited us has been sitting in our cupboard since then. So I kind of knew that the taste might not be so good... but I was kind of hoping that my coffee naive palate wouldn't notice. Anyway, I didn't really like the texture, regardless of the flavor. It was a little too icy - which I should have expecting since it is just coffee, sugar, milk and cocoa powder. Well, four out of five winners from one cookbook ain't bad!

Mango Sorbet

Ooh. Mango sorbet. I have always had a weakness for mango sorbet. I used to buy pints of Haagen Daz mango sorbet during college and I would eat about a quarter of a cup at a time so that I could enjoy it as long as possible. Once, I came home from a long day of classes and went to the freezer to enjoy a little bit of frozen mango goodness. I took the pint out of the freezer and the realization came upon me that it felt much lighter than it should have. My roommate, who apparently subscribed to the "if it's in our apartment, it must be meant for sharing" philosophy of roommating, had eaten some of my precious sorbet. Needless to say I was not that happy with her. Now that I look back at it, it was rather ridiculous of me to be mad at her for eating a dollar's worth of sorbet, but it seemed totally rational at the time.

I made yet another David Lebovitz recipe this week, this time his mango sorbet. His recipe calls for rum, but I skipped that because we don't have any. It was still out of this world delicious. Such an intense mango flavor, and much more texture than store-bought sorbet. And it makes enough that if someone ate a serving without my permission, I would still be friends with them.

Mango Sorbet
2 large, ripe mangoes
2/3 cup sugar
2/3 cup water
4 tsp freshly squeezed lime juice, plus more to taste
Pinch of salt

Peel the mangoes and cut into chunks. Put mango chunks, sugar, water, lime juice, and salt in a blender and puree until smooth. Taste, then add more lime juice if desired. Chill the mizture thoroughly, then freeze in your ice cream maker.

Strawberry Sorbet

I made another David Lebovitz recipe, this time from his sorbet section of his book The Perfect Scoop. I picked up a pound of fresh strawberries from the grocery store since they were on sale. I prepped everything the day before so that I could have the pureed strawberry mixture chilled overnight. I think the old adage "patience is a virtue" was spoken in the context of making homemade ice cream. When the instructions say that the mixture needs to be chilled overnight, it needs to be chilled overnight. Not for two hours like I have before because I was impatient and wanted ice cream already.

This sorbet has a fresh, intense strawberry flavor - this one will get repeated in our house! It was still good the next day too. I don't know how it is two days later, since it was all gone by then!