Faux-Blood Orange Sorbet & Candied Orange Peel

This weekend, it was my mom’s birthday, and the “kids” were cooking, so we decided to make a dessert using the Sorbet and the Lemon Tart from our club’s first menu. I took on the task of making the sorbet since I like playing with the ice cream machine. Lee made the tart and she’ll be posting her experience on that separately. We went to Safeway in Mountain View getting supplies for the birthday dinner. We had a bunch of Mandarin Oranges at home (or so I thought), so I didn’t worry about getting more oranges. There were no Blood Oranges at Safeway, so I decided to substitute Mandarin Oranges at home.

When we got home, I found that we only had 15 Mandarin Oranges. So I started squeezing the juice out. The recipe calls for 3 cups of juice. I only managed to get 1 cup out of 15. So then I used lemons (we had a bunch for the tart) to fill in the rest. It took 10 lemons to get me 2 more cups. I followed the recipe thereafter and a had the sorbet in the ice cream machine, while I played some Starcraft 2 Beta. I lost a couple of games, and voila! The sorbet was done. I put it in the freezer, and it waited in there for dessert then following night.

For the Candied Orange Peel, I worked on that prior to dinner. The one problem I had was I couldn't get the temperature high enough, so when the peels were drying after their boil, they didn't crytalize and harden. They remained soggy. But the taste was ok, and they still worked on top of the sorbet.

Since this recipe only had water, sugar, and juice, it required a few minutes to thaw out prior to serving as it had “iced” up. So I let it sit for about 3 minutes while we sang “Happy Birthday” to my mom. She blew out the candle on the lemon tart. Then we cut slices and I tried to shape quenelles with the sorbet, but it was a little “dry” and didn’t stick together that well. This made me want to find another recipe or think of ways to modify this one with some sort of gelling agent to get it more “sticky” like you see with a store-bought sorbet. However the taste was alright, very tart from the lemon, but lacking on the orange flavor. But it worked well for the dinner since we all liked the tartness and it complimented the lemon tart.

Next time, I would try to add a pinch of Xathan Gum to give a slight gel texture to it, and to prevent icing. I had just tried this with some ice cream (put too much), and it definitely stops the icing over, and adds a smooth/creamy texture.

Putting the liquid sorbet into the ice cream machine.

Only could get to 210 degrees. =(


Soggy candied orange peels.