Okay – so I know that I’ve gone a bit over the top with beetroot recently, but as I mentioned in an earlier post, there’s a 3 for 2 offer on tubs of beetroot at the Tesco’s down the road, so I had my ‘get one free’ pot to use up.

A friend mentioned earlier that she’d had a beetroot sorbet, which inspired me to try a beetroot ice cream.

It’s really easy to make, and would be a high-impact dessert. I don’t have a big sweet-tooth, so I reckoned it really was a great ice cream flavour…I’m just not sure that it was great with blackberry compote. Sure – it looked dramatic, but the flavours didn’t complement each other in the way I’d hoped, so let me know if you come up with any better pairings…

Ingredients (for about 6 individual ice cream portions)
350g cooked beetroot
150ml apple juice
70g caster sugar
2 tablespoons of lemon juice
50 ml double cream

Start off by making the syrup. Pour the apple and lemon juice into a pan, add the sugar and let it simmer gently until the sugar has totally dissolved. Let it cool.

In the meantime, puree the beetroot.

Once the syrup has cooled, combine the beetroot puree and pour in the double cream. Usually you’d press the mixture through a sieve with a wooden spoon. For some odd reason, I don’t have a sieve but a do have this industrial, stainless steel vegetable mill, so it was a good excuse to get it out and rinse off the dust!

Spoon the mixture into individual moulds (or just into a tub) and then pop it into the freezer. If you’re at home when the ice cream is freezing, then stir it on the odd occasion to break up the crystals.

Bring the moulds out of the freezer a little bit before you’re serving them to make sure that the ice cream isn’t too hard. I tried serving them with crème fraiche, double cream and dark fruit compote. Have a go and let me know how you get on.