Caramelized Rye Bread Ice Cream (Condensed Milk Ice Cream)

Here's a super-simple ice cream with an Estonian twist. The caramelized rye bread lends a lovely slightly gritty texture (and I mean it in a wholly positive way) to the otherwise super-creamy ice cream, as well as a slightly earthy-tangy flavour.

The recipe works both with ice cream machine and without one - I've given instructions for both ways. Most importantly, there's no tricky custard-making bit, as the ice cream uses condensed milk as its base (that also means there's no danger of curdling :))

Here in Estonia, I simply buy a bag of ready-grated rye bread and caramelize it with some sugar. You can obviously use stale rye bread (preferably naturally leavened type), and grind it yourself. Or perhaps even try with those rye crisp breads (knäckerbröd) that are pretty universally available, smashing them into fine powder before proceeding.

K. isn't a great fan of ice cream, but he asked for this one after every single meal we had last weekend :)

Rye Bread Condensed Milk Ice Cream
(Riivleivajäätis)
Serves 8 to 10



400 g tin sweetened condensed milk
600 ml whipping cream* (35% fat content)
100 g grated rye bread
2 Tbsp caster sugar

First, fry the grated bread and some sugar on a dry hot pan for a few minutes, stirring regularly, until caramelized. Remove from the heat and cool completely.

If using an ice cream machine: pour the condensed milk and cream into a measuring jug and stir thoroughly. (* You can use half whipping/double cream and half single cream, when churning the ice cream in a machine). Pour into your ice cream maker and churn into ice cream according to the instructions. When almost done, fold in the cool caramelized rye bread, stir thoroughly. Pour the ice cream into freezer-proof container and place into the freezer for an hour or two before serving.

If you're not using an ice cream machine: whip the cream until soft peaks form. Pour in the condensed milk and whisk for another minute or two, until thoroughly combined. Fold in the caramelized rye bread mixture. Pour into freezer-proof container and place into the freezer for about 4-6 hours, until the mixture is frozen. As you're using whipped cream, there's no need to stir the ice cream during the freezing process.

Home-Made Rhubarb Ice Cream Recipe

It's been raining non-stop for the last two days (or is it three now?), and the temperatures have dropped below 10 Celsius. That's quite sad, as the kids have all began their summer vacations and just last weekend the weather was hot, sunny and truly summery. Full of promise. That's when I made this rhubarb ice cream, to keep us cool in the heat. I really loved the creaminess that wasn't cloying, as the acidity of the rhubarb came through. Plus it had a rather nice colour, don't you think?

It's very easy to make, as you only need to whisk the egg yolks, and not turn them into a custard base. You don't even need an ice cream machine to make it, even though it's a lot easier if you have got one. (If you haven't got one, then read the instructions further down on how to make the no-churn version of this.)

Home-Made Rhubarb Ice Cream
(Rabarbrijäätis)
Serves six to eight



300 g young rosy-pink rhubarb stalks
4 Tbsp water
85 g sugar
200 ml whipping cream (35%)
200 ml single/pouring cream (10%)
3 egg yolks
2 tsp icing sugar/confectioner's sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract

Cut the rhubarb into thin slices. Place in a small saucepan with water and sugar, bring into a boil and simmer gently for about 10 minutes, until the rhubarb has softened. Cool and blend into a purée. (Look at the pretty colour of the purée below!)
Whisk egg yolks with icing sugar until pale and frothy. Fold in the creams and cooled rhubarb purée.
Place into the fridge for 1-2 hours, to cool the mixture thoroughly.
Then churn in your ice cream machine according to the instructions. If necessary, place in a bowl with a lid into the freezer to harden.



PS! If you haven't got an ice cream machine, then you can still make this ice cream. Use 300-400 ml of whipping cream instead of 200 ml of single and 200 ml of double cream. Whisk until soft peaks form, then fold into the whisked egg yolks together with the rhubarb purée. Place in a container, cover and freeze. (You may stir it couple of times during the next few hours, but it's not necessarily necessary). Take out of the freezer to soften about 20 minutes before serving.

Do try these at home: some dishes from other food bloggers

What would I do without you, other foodbloggers?? You are a constant source of fantastic inspiration, and here's just a snapshot of dishes I've tried lately.

David Lebovitz's fantastic Fresh Apricot Ice Cream (especially if you've got some lovely French apricots from the market). MattBites kindly provides the recipe. I had no almond extract at home, so used 2 tsp of Amaretto instead. Lovely..

David Lebovitzi aprikoosijäätis

Oh, and while you're at it - his Strawberry Sour Cream Ice Cream is pretty delicious as well (Dagmar has the recipe). I made it quite a few times this summer, and my Estonian friends say the recipe works with bilberries, too:

Maasika-hapukoorejäätis

Elise's Tuscan Scrambled Eggs made a great light supper, and we'll be making it again soon:

Toskaana munahüüve

I really enjoyed Patricia's Crash-Hot Potatoes (see also Wendy's version):

Krõbedad purustatud kartulid

And while we're at it, here are couple of really-really-really tasty dishes Ximena made us when we were visiting her and her husband J. in Madrid in April. First off, Ferrán Adrià´s bag-of-chips tortilla was both genius and tasty:

Ximena kartulikrõpsutortilja

Similarly, Ximena's salmorejo is so worth making with some ripe summer tomatoes:

Salmorejo - Hispaania tomatidipp

And last, but by no means least, my friend Alanna in St Louis makes a great Classic Seven-Layer Salad:


Thank you, everybody!!

David Lebovitz's Prune & Armagnac Ice Cream

David Lebovitz, everybody's favourite ice-cream (and chocolate sauerkraut cake) guru wrote about humble prunes in Los Angeles Times last week (you can follow the link here). We like prunes in our house - juicy Californian prunes make an excellent nibble - and are somewhat amused by the fact that Californian Prune producers had to rebrand prunes as 'dried plums' few years ago. David's Prune and Armagnac Ice Cream sounded very appealing, so this was the first recipe we tried. I didn't use Armagnac cognac, but an acceptable local favourite, a 9-year old Georgian Gremi Brandy (that's Georgia in the Caucasus mountains, and not in the Southeastern US).

A very, very likeable ice cream. No custard to make, just soak the prunes in cognac/brandy, blitz with sour cream, milk and some sugar and churn. How easy is that??

We've been eating ours plain until now, but I can see that it'd be an excellent accompanion to an intensely dark chocolate cake - perhaps Tarte au Chocolat? In any case, it's not too sweet (I deducted a spoonful of sugar from the original recipe), and it tastes somehow more grown-up (not sure if it's the brandy or the prunes). A keeper, for sure.

(Ploomi-konjakijäätis)

Other prune aka dried plum recipes at Nami-nami:
Dried Plum and Curd Cheese Dessert
Braised Red Cabbage with Prunes
A Simple Prune Cake

Other ice cream and sorbet recipes at Nami-nami:
Nigella Lawson's No-Churn Pomegranate Ice Cream
Sea-Buckthorn Sorbet
Orange 'Fanta' Sorbet
Gooseberry Sorbet
Heston Blumenthal's Jersey milk ice cream
Hibiscus & Strawberry Sorbet
A Quartet of Frozen Desserts: Vietnamese Coffee Ice Cream, Coconut Sorbet, Watermelon Sorbet, Vanilla Ice Cream

Nigella Lawson's No-Churn Pomegranate Ice Cream

I looooooove Nigella. Apart from my pistachio macarons disaster, all the recipes I've tried from her books have worked like a charm. Be it Pasta alla Vodka, Store-cupboard Chocolate and Orange Cake, Cranberry Upside-down Cake, Upside-down Red Onion Supper Pie, Chocolate-Cherry Cupcakes, Pan-fried Halloumi with Chilli Drizzle, Raw Beetroot Salad with Dill and Mustard Seeds, her Rum-Soaked Banana Bread, her cheeky Cheesy Feet, Rosemary Loaf Cake, or her Lemon and Parmesan Linguini - you name it, I love it. Her effortless and luscious style of cooking, and easy, yet decadent choice of recipes appeals as well. So when my friend Ruxandra recently offered to send me her extra copy of Nigella Express, of course I said yes.

Within a fortnight I had tried quite a number of recipes from the book. I've already shared her Cider and Mustard Pork Chops with you; I've also tried and enjoyed her recipes for Hokey Pokey, and Grilled Duck Breasts with Pomegranate Seeds. And then there was this beautiful, beautiful no-churn ice cream recipe. The fact that it's no-churn is neither here or there for me - I've got a Kitchen Aid ice cream attachment, so I'm ok with traditional churning ice creams. However, I'm also very keen on pomegranates and have been able to source some extremely sweet and juicy and delectable pomegranates at my local supermarket recently, so I was keen to try this. And Nigella - it was absolutely delicious again!

I've changed the quantitites to fit local conditions (cream is sold in 200 ml tubs here, as opposed to 240 ml tubs in the UK, so I've downsized that bit); also I used 35% whipping cream instead of 48% double cream suggested in the original recipe. And because my pomegranates were so sweet, I reduced the amount of sugar - you may want to stick with the original

Nigella Lawson's No-Churn Pomegranate Ice Cream
(Nigella granaatõunajäätis)
Serves 6-8



2 pomegranates
1 lime
150 g icing sugar/powdered sugar
400 ml whipping cream

Halve the pomegranates (reserve some pomegranate seeds for garnish) and the lime, juice them and strain the juices into a bowl. You'll need just under 200 ml of pomegranate juice*.
Add the icing sugar and whisk to dissolve.
Whisk in the whipping cream, and keep whisking until soft peaks form.
Spoon and smooth the ice cream into a rigid plastic container with a tight-fitting lid. Place into a freezer for at least four hours or overnight.
To serve, let the ice cream soften for 5-10 minutes, then scoop into nice bowls (I used my Iittala glass bowls), scatter with pomegranate seeds and enjoy.

* You can use a good-quality pomegranate juice instead, but I doubt it'll be as tart-sweet as freshly squeezed juice.

Another berry dessert: Sea-buckthorn sorbet

I know, I know - it's not even a month since I wrote about sea-buckthorn berries and yet I'm weekend-herb-blogging about this bright orange berry again. But you see - we recently got two large bags of sea buckthorn berries from my grandma's garden, and we need to find ways to use all those berries. One of the readers had recommended I try a sea buckthorn sorbet, and as we had really enjoyed the taste and colour of our orange 'Fanta' sorbet (NB! I've updated the post with interesting information about the amount of orange juice in Estonian and Greek Fanta Orange!), we decided to make a sorbet again. This one is just as delicious as the orange sorbet, with an attractive deep orange-yellow colour. A perfect palate-cleanser between courses, or an excellent dessert.

But to make it worthy for a Weekend Herb Blogging submission, I give you a good tip for cleaning sea-buckthorn berries. You see, sea-buckthorn branches are prickly shrubs, and the berries are quite soft. Picking them individually from the branches is a difficult, messy, painful and wasteful task. It's best to cut off berry-laden branches from the tree, remove superfluous leaves and smaller berry-free branches with scissors, wash and drain the branches, and throw them into your deep freezer for 24 hours. Then remove the branches from the freezer, and pick off the berries - as they are frozen, they come off very easily now.

Keep the berries in the deep freezer. For an excellent refreshing smoothie, blitz a handful of frozen berries in a blender, mix with water, press through a fine sieve and sweeten with sugar. Or make this sorbet:

Sea Buckthorn Sorbet
(Astelpajusorbee)



200 ml water
200 ml sugar
400 ml sea-buckthorn juice, preferably freshly extracted

You can either use shop-bought good-quality sea-buckthorn juice, or make your own. To make your own, wash about a cup of sea-buckthorn berries and puree in a blender. Press through a fine sieve. Then take some boiling water and pour over the sea-buckthorn pulp on the sieve to extract more juice. Continue, until you've got 400 ml liquid. (Using boiling water helps to extract more 'juice matter' from the pulp).
Pour water and sugar into a small saucepan and bring to the boil. Reduce heat and simmer for 5 minutes to make a syrup. Cool.
Mix sea-buckthorn juice and syrup and churn in your ice cream maker according to the instructions. (We gave it 25 minutes in a Kitchen Aid ice cream attachment).
Put in the freezer to harden a little before serving.

WHB: This is also my entry to the Weekend Herb Blogging, this time hosted by Kalyn herself. Click on the logo below for more information about this established foodblogging event.

A little bit of sunshine: Orange Sorbet, sprinkled with pistachios

Living behind the impenetrable Iron Curtain, I grew up without bananas, McDonalds and Coca Cola. But we did have Pepsi Cola and Fanta. When Mr Nixon became the President of the USA, Pepsi became the first foreign consumer product to be sold in the USSR - apparently it was traded for Stolichnaya vodka. Fanta entered the Soviet shops when Mr Carter was presiding over the USA in 1979; Coca Cola arrived with Mr Reagan in 1985*. And it was the distant memory of Fanta - a orange-flavoured soft drink I haven't had for ages - that so vividly came to my mind when sipping the last, melted scoops of this beautifully coloured sorbet last morning..

Of course, there is much more to Fanta than freshly squeezed orange juice, sugar and water (and what is inside Fanta depends on where you're buying it - do read the note below**). But the association is there, at least for me. This was super-easy to make - as long as you've got an ice-cream machine (and I do), and extremely rewarding. We'll be making this sorbet again and again soon, as well as experiment with other citrus flavours..

Orange Sorbet
(Apelsinisorbee)
Serves 6

400 ml freshly squeezed orange juice
200 ml water
200 ml caster sugar
pistachio nuts, to serve (optional)

Pour water and sugar into a small saucepan and bring to the boil. Reduce heat and simmer for 5 minutes to make a syrup. Cool.
Mix cold orange juice and syrup and churn in your ice cream maker according to the instructions. (We gave it 20 minutes in a Kitchen Aid ice cream attachment).
Put in the freezer to harden a little before serving.

To serve, sprinkle with pistachio nuts for a great colour impact.

* Read this New York Times article from 1995 for more information.
** According to Wikipedia,
the Spanish Fanta Orange contains Carbonated water, sugar, 8% orange juice from concentrate, acidity regulator E-330 (citric acid), aromas, preserver E-211 (sodium benzoate), stabilizers E-414 (gum arabic), E-412 (guar gum), E-445, antioxidant E-300 (ascorbic acid), food coloring E-160a and gelatine (made from fish). The US Fanta Orange contains Carbonated water, high fructose corn syrup and/or sucrose, citric acid, sodium benzoate, modified food starch, natural and artificial flavors, sucrose acetate isobutyrate, sodium polyphosphates, coconut oil, yellow 6, brominated vegetable oil, red 40, dioctyl sodium sulfosuccinate.
So if you're buying Fanta Orange in the US, my orange juice association may seem totally out of place to you - there's none in the American version :)

UPDATE 31.10.2007: I've also learnt that Estonian Fanta Orange contains 3% orange juice (in the interest of research, I drank one last week. And yes, the association still holds:), and a Greek Fanta Orange a whopping 20% orange juice! What a difference! (Note that Coca Cola recipe is the same across the world).

Pretty in Pink: A Gooseberry Sorbet

It's hot here in Estonia. I'm sure Estonia feels still cool enough for Ximena & J. who last weekend arrived here up in the North hoping to escape the Spanish summer heat (they're currently holidaying on Saaremaa, a beautiful island off the west coast). But I'm having real difficulties with the temperatures around +30 Celsius and constant sunshine. So much so that I've opted to stay and work from home for a few days. You see, the beach is just 5 minutes away, so I can always hop on my bike, cycle to the beach and dip into the waves to cool the body and clear the mind.

Alternatively, I can have yet another scoop of ice cream. I made a second batch of David Lebovitz's wonderfully tasting and amazingly simple Vietnamese coffee ice cream this afternoon - if you haven't tried that one (and like your coffee with milk & sugar), then I strongly suggest you pick up a can of sweetened condensed milk next time you're at the supermarket! But here's a sorbet recipe from a fortnight ago. Not just any sorbet, but a gooseberry sorbet of most beautiful pink shade. I served this at the recent movie night, together with four other frozen desserts, where it was a clear favourite with many of my friends. This gooseberry sorbet has a sweet yet subtly sharp flavour, and requires a use of ripe and good-flavoured gooseberries.

Gooseberry Sorbet
(Tikrisorbee)



350 ml water
300 g sugar
500 g ripe red gooseberries

Top and tail the gooseberries.
Bring the water to the boil, add sugar and stir, until dissolved. Add gooseberries and boil for 5 minutes, until softened.
Cool, then puree in a blender. Press through a fine sieve, trying to gather as much of the juices as possible.
Place into the fridge for an hour, or until the mixture is thoroughly cool.
Churn in your ice cream machine according to the instructions.

BLAST FROM THE PAST
A year ago I shared a recipe for a summery chicken with creamy mustard and dill sauce and crispy bacon. Two years ago I wrote about carrots pickled with rosemary and orange juice - both of which I still happily recommend you'd try.

K is guest-blogging about Heston Blumenthal's perfect ice cream

There is obviously a good reason for stepping up as a first guest blogger: current recipe is inspired of In Search of Perfection by Heston Blumenthal, a challenging macho cookbook waiting for the boys’ egos to be satisfied. Browsing through the 20-plus step recipes Pille decided that it is not her style. Therefore it takes a guest blogger for Blumenthal to be featured here on Nami-Nami.

I noticed Jersey milk ice cream recipe in the book right away as it included dry ice as a freezing component (see here; note step 2 of the recipe: 'Put on safety gloves and protective goggles and open the packet of dry ice':). Carbon dioxide ice at -78.5 C is a familiar substance to me from constructing a cloud chamber for tracking cosmic particles, a well-known experiment in particle physics. Dry ice is mainly of industrial use and it can be bought only during working hours and from the industrial gas company situated far outside the city. While I was waiting for a moment to go and fetch it, our KitchenAid Ice Cream Attachment had finally arrived from Germany. Although using dry ice would have lead to dramatic photos of the mystical fumes sneaking out of the bowl, it seemed quite pointless to overcomplicate things.

Eliminating dry ice lead to an unexpected realisation: with just four components - milk, double cream, unrefined caster sugar and glucose syrup - to be heated gently until the sugar has dissolved, this is one of the simplest ice cream recipes one can possibly find.

Blumenthal’s book has a pleasant feature: thorough stories about finding the best ingredients, the essential part of a quest for perfection. For example ice cream recipe requires milk with fat content 5.2% from organic free-range Jersey cows. I have nice memories of cycling on a sunny autumn day through green pastures on Jersey Island few years ago and participating in a staring contest with a genuine free-range Jersey cow, but I also remember that it took me a multi-stop air travel and a whole day to get there. Besides Estonians do not use double cream with fat content 48%, we have whipping cream (fat content 35% - 38%) instead.

Therefore following Blumenthal’s footsteps, without compromising his perfectionism, called for creativity. I calculated that an average fat content of a milk/double cream mixture in the recipe was 21.2% and for the whole recipe 17.3%. (For the sake of comparison David Lebovitz's vanilla ice cream that Pille prepared a day before had 25.2% fat content for the dairy component plus 5 high-calorie egg yolks making an average fat content of a mix 21.4%). Using premium 3.5% milk and 35% whipping cream in 50/50 mixture I ended up with 19.2% fat for a dairy component and overall fat content 15.7%. That falls neatly in the middle of the range of 10-20% fat content, that according to Harold McGee is characteristic to most good ice cream recipes.

Glucose syrup is needed in the mix to give ice cream smooth, creamy consistency without the presence of yolks or high fat content.

After standard procedure with the ice cream maker, the end result was with smooth texture and notably milky, clean and fresh taste. I was resisting temptation to add a spoonful of Pure Madagascar Bourbon Vanilla Extractor to throw in pieces of quality chocolate or to pour over some maple syrup. The recipe just seemed too simple. I closed my eyes and brought back childhood memories of a simple milk ice cream called Plombiir. In 1980s we had Soviet Union, iron curtain and stagnation and the producers did not yet know the virtues of artificial ingredients and milk & skimmed milk powders.

Blumenthal writes in his book: 'Perfection is the ultimate, the best something can possibly be. For many of us, the perfect meal won’t be some fancy restaurant food. Stuck on a desert island, our dream dish is more likely something we grew up with and have taken to our hearts.'

Apparently molecular-gastronomic image does not tell all about the chef of The Fat Duck.

For the Jersey milk ice cream

500ml Jersey whole milk
300ml double cream
80g unrefined caster sugar
100g glucose syrup

Piimajäätis
400ml 3,5% Alma piima
400ml 35% Alma vahukoort
80g demerara suhkrut
100g glükoosisiirupit

Segada ained kergelt kuumutades kuni suhkur on sulanud, jahuta. Jäätisemasinas segada madalal kiirusel kuni segu omandab pehme jäätise struktuuri. Jätta segu tahenema sügavkülmikusse.

Perfect scoops: Vietnamese coffee ice cream, Coconut sorbet, Watermelon sorbet and Vanilla Ice cream

When Santa brought me a flashy KitchenAid Artisan Stand Mixer (in stunning Imperial Red, of course) for Christmas last year, then I got a free food grinder on top of the deal. I LOVE the stand mixer, and use it a lot. The food grinder attachment has proved to be quite a handy piece of equipment as well, I must say, which I've put into good use by grinding my own lamb for small lamb and pomegranate molasses pies, pureeing various berries for flavoured cheesecakes, and mincing beetroot, garlic, pinenuts and coriander for Alanna's fabulous beetroot pesto. But I knew that a sturdy Kitchen Aid is capable of so much more, providing you get the right extras. In April, with the long Estonian summer nights still only looming, we decided that we could really do with an ice cream attachment. Kitchen Aid is not readily available in Estonia yet, but we were going to London in April for a weekend with Johanna to feed our stomachs at The Petersham Nurseries and our eyes at The Borough Market. A perfect opportunity to buy the ice cream machine, no?

No. Although we spotted the ice cream machine in question in several good cookshops, with a big sign stating the RRP, they refused to sell it to us. You see, apparently you would have to buy the Kitchen Aid standing mixer, and then you'd get the ice cream machine for free. But to buy the ice cream machine separately was against some weird corporate rule. Well, we had the stand mixer already and had no plans of buying another one just so we could get the ice cream attachment! The same thing happened in Edinburgh in June - the Kitchen Aid ice cream machine, if available at all, was only sold as part of the stand mixer deal. Not separately..

Luckily, the rules in Germany are more relaxed. My friend Margit, who moved to Köln last year, drove to Estonia for a few weeks, and didn't mind to pick up the long-awaited-for ice cream machine to us. So now we have our ice cream machine, and we've certainly put it into good use. During the first week of ownership we churned out a new ice cream every night. We even used the excuse of a movie night to serve 5 different ice creams to our friends!

To start with, we made four ice creams/sorbets from the Reigning King of Frozen Desserts, David Lebovitz. The first ice cream we tried was his Vanilla Ice Cream (photo bottom left), which was a traditional custard-based ice cream. I loved the strong vanilla flavour (I used one of those fat vanilla beans that I had got as a gift from Melissa), but found the ice cream itself to be a bit too rich for my liking. Next time I'll try David's Philadelphia style vanilla ice cream, as that contains no eggs, so should be much lighter. Second ice cream we tried was Watermelon Sorbetto from his highly praised book The Perfect Scoop: Ice Creams, Sorbets, Granitas, and Sweet Accessories. The sorbetto was fantastic - so simple to make, with a pure watermelon flavour and extremely refreshing (see photo top right and see recipe here or here). A definite keeper! That was another followed by another super-easy and extremely delicious (and here I didn't even mind the ice cream being quite rich) ice cream - Vietnamese Coffee Ice Cream. The name refers to the way coffee is served in Vietnam - always with sweetened condensed milk. The ice cream couldn't have been easier to make - you mix a can of condensed milk with 2 cups of strong coffee, cool and churn. Absolutely wonderful (you'll find a recipe in this article in San Francisco Chronicle), and I can see myself making this again and again. And last, but not least, we made a coconut sorbet. Well, there is no such recipe in David's book, if I'm honest with you. David provides a recipe for a Chocolate-Coconut Sorbet (see recipe here), but as I've been dreaming about coconut ice cream ever since I had a lovely version in Edinburgh just over a year ago, I simply adapted David's recipe to fit my ideal of a coconut ice cream :) And it was a successful adaptation, if I may say so myself - whiter than white, and really coconutty.

And I warn you now - there will be lots of ice cream posts on Nami-nami in the near future. For starters, there's this gooseberry sorbet recipe I simply have to share, and then there's a post by a very special guest blogger on the way. Stay tuned!!

Eestikeelsed retseptid (NB adapteeritud kohalikele kooreprotsentidele jms!):
Vietnami kohvijäätis
Kookosesorbee
Arbuusisorbee

HHDD # 13: Hibiscus & Strawberry Sorbet

In May I made Strawberries in Hibiscus & Vanilla Syrup, following a recipe from Chez Pim. I loved the dessert - just like Pim said, the hibiscus syrup gave a certain depth, an extra flavour dimension, to strawberries without interfering with the neat strawberry flavour. I also wondered back then, if I could use the strawberry & hibiscus pairing in other desserts, like ice creams or sorbet, for example. But, alas, as I didn't have an ice cream machine, I didn't do any further experiments with flowers (that's what hibiscus is) and berries.

I still don't have an ice cream machine, but will - if everything goes as planned - have one in a fortnight. Yet when I saw that Laura had chosen sorbet for the 13th round of Hay Hay Donna Day (as in Donna Hay, the Australian Kitchen Goddess who publishes impossibly beautiful food magazines), I wanted to take part. It would be a good opportunity to 'try' my sorbet version, and maybe - hsss! hope dies last - winning the top-notch prize in the form of The Perfect Scoop by David Lebovitz - a book that every foodblogger but me seems to have and enjoy*!!

The hibiscus & strawberry sorbet worked well, and it was definitely worthwhile. While my sorbet isn't as smooth-textured as I would have wanted, it tasted very strawberry-ish, looked much deeper red (and strawberry-ish, again) than it would have looked without the addition of hibiscus flowers. So here I am, pleased to present my hibiscus & strawberry sorbet as my first ever contribution to the Hay Hay Donna Day event! Keep your fingers crossed for me then :)

Hibiscus & Strawberry Sorbet
Based on Donna Hay's basic sorbet recipe and Chez Pim's recipe for Strawberries in Hibiscus & Vanilla Syrup



150 grams caster sugar
300 ml water
2 Tbsp of dried hibiscus flowers or 2 hibiscus tea bags
half a vanilla bean, cut open
750 grams fresh strawberries, pureed and strained
mint leaves to garnish

Bring water to the boil in a small saucepan, remove from the heat, add the tea bags or dried hibiscus flowers and let it infuse for about 15 minutes. Remove the tea bags, or strain the liquid and discard the soaked hibiscus flowers.
Add sugar to hibiscus infusion, place the saucepan over a low heat and stir without boiling until sugar is dissolved.
Increase the heat and bring to the boil for one minute. Stick the vanilla bean into the syrup and set aside to cool.
While the syrup is cooling, puree and strain the strawberries.
Combine the fruit puree and hibiscus-infused sugar syrup (removing the vanilla bean first), place in an ice-cream maker and follow the manufacturer's instructions.
If you don't have an ice-cream maker, place the fruit and syrup mixture in a metal cake tin, cover and freeze for an hour or until just beginning to set at the edge. Mash thoroughly with a large fork, breaking up the forming ice crystals. Return to the freezer. Repeat three times at hourly intervals or until the sorbet is thick and smooth.

* And a book that I so badly need, considering that I'll finally - after lots of trials - will be a proud owner of an ice cream machine in a week or so :)

BLAST FROM THE PAST
One year ago I wrote how I was having a pint in a pub in Edinburgh with the then President of Estonia (as you regularly do, eh:) Here's the story and a photo to prove it.