This month, Becks & Posh challenged us to make a lovely dessert which is low fat and less sugar. It's an excellent idea after all the excesses from the end of year partying and before more binging starts with Chinese New Year feasts.
When I started out thinking what I wanted to do, I knew I did not want to use honey (did it before for another SHF event) and I ain't no fan of artificial sugar substitutes so my choices were limited. Eventually I decided to just go with the flow and make a simple dessert with the mountain of tangerines I have at home since it's Chinese New Year.
The dessert was inspired by Donna Hay who has excellent ideas of freezing yoghurts or sorbets in fruit cups and slicing them. However, when I looked at the recipes, they still had quite a bit of fat or sugar syrup to make the sorbets hence I only used the fruit cup idea. From my experience, I note that once you freeze or refrigerate any dessert, you don't really taste the amount of sugar in it hence I decided no additional sugar will be added since the tangerine would be sweet enough.
I experimented with my tangerines and carefully managed to dig the segments out without breaking the skin. Quite a difficult task to do as the tangerine skin is pretty thin. Then I pureed the segments and sieved them to omit any large bits. This was placed in the freezer overnight together with my tangerine cups. The next day, I used a fork to scrape up the ice. It's essential that you fluff them up as you want them light. I then packed them lightly in my frozen tangerine cups. They looked good but lacked ooopmh!
A quick run through the fridge revealed a bunch of mint leaves left over from my Donna Day event so I made mint ice cubes. They're really simple, just pluck mint leaves and put them in the ice cube tray and pour water on them. Leave in the freezer and you'll get lovely green mint ice cubes. I used them as a base in a transparent glass cup to place my tangerine crush on top. A very quick photo shoot was done as the ice was melting in our hot tropical weather. After all that hard work, I had a few cups of the crush to cool down and they were so refreshing in the hot weather. If you have loads of tangerines or mandarin oranges, do try this at home as it's great refresher especially in the hot weather we will get this Chinese New Year. Just remember to eat it quickly as it melts super fast in our weather.
Tagged with: SHF # 15 + Low Sugar
wow, looking really good. and to imagine its all natural!
ReplyDeleteare the mint ice cubes for deco only, or to eat one?
ReplyDeletehappy chinese new year to you too!
ReplyDeleteBoo-licious - thank you for your entry - it looks very refreshing and satisfying and healthful. I remember those Donna Hay sorbet photographs and its great you managed to do it without anty extra sugar.
ReplyDeletesam
Hey...I love your new creative idea. Sounds pretty simple to prepare too. Will try it out....:D. Happy Chinese New Year to you :DD.
ReplyDeleterokh - yes, it's natural so don't expect it to be super sweet but at least it's healthy.
ReplyDeletefatboybakes - you can use the mint leaves cubes as deco and eat them too. They're excellent in a drink as it will get the minty fresh smell.
sam - thanks so much for dropping by. If it wasn't a low sugar entry, I would have added the yoghurt but I thought natural fruit sweeteners sound good enough when you're on a health streak.
emotionalistic - happy new year.