Sorbet making

Who says you can’t accessorize your flowers with your fruit? My crocosmias are perfect next to the apricots.

But in this weather, something has to be done with these golden orbs. Fast.

I love nothing more than stewed apricots with yoghurt for breakfast. I could eat the lot.

But with guests in attendance, that means I need to make some sort of dessert.  My usual fall back entertainment – fruit tarts – means turning on the oven and basting in my own juices (the chef not the tart) for 40 minutes.

You can find the recipe in my food section of the blog. And it’s a brilliant easy one.

This week I have gone for something that gives me an excuse to open the deep freezer a few times to cool down.  Sorbets.

(I won’t bore you with the ingredients and method here, just look in the August section of the recipes.)

And I must say that I put my guests to work with a taste test.  Do the sorbets work better with stewed apricots or just blended to a fine consistency?

The answer is definitely stewed apricots. The texture is less crystal-y. And I guess with just an extra teesny bit of liquid to stew the fruit, it’s a better consistency.

I stew the fruit with a slurp of syrup. Anything on hand; this week jostaberry cordial. But it’s brilliant with elderflower cordial.  What a shame I have been drunk out of house and home this year.  I have no cordial supplies put away for winter.

But back to the sorbets. The beauty of this recipe is you blend your sugar syrup – spiked with aromatics like mint or verbena or scented pelargonium – with the fruit and then plonk the whole thing in the deep freeze for an hour.

Remove, blend and repeat.

So you get nicely chilled. And it saves on washing up.

Now were I a proper, careful blogger, you would have beautifully staged shots of the sorbets.

I did manage to photograph my lovely aromatics.  Pelargonium attar of roses, a strong spearmint, and of course, lemon verbena.

But by the time I remembered, the sorbet was into the sensible tupperware containers and safely tucked into the freezer.

Bad blogger. I didn’t even make time to print the labels. It was just post it notes and gaffer tape and nothing elegant at all. And with a broken middle finger on my left hand (don’t ask, a gardening related injury involving slipping down the orchard slope and arresting my fall) my handwriting is decidedly wonky.

But the flavour was exceptional and they went down a treat.