A Last Minute Ice Cream Experiment

When I heard about the theme for Kavey's ice cream round up this month, I was super excited...
Sorbets, granitas, slushies and spooms. SPOOMS. Could there honestly be anything more awesome sounding?

In fact, though, time and freezer space massively conspired against me in April, so what I have ended up with is a last minute non churned dessert that lies somewhere near the middle of the sorbet/slushie/spoom spectrum.
A kind of sorbushoom, if you will :-)

Anyone who knows me will know that I'm a proper fruit fiend. Berries in particular.
In order to feed my addiction, I have a freezer full of frozen fruit.
On reflection, this may be contributing towards the lack of freezer space.
It struck me that liquidising frozen fruit might well make a kind of sorbet - in the summer, I quite often eat it direct from the freezer mixed with yogurt, which gives an extremely pleasing ice cream effect - so I reckoned that I could maybe spoomulate something similar.

First I made some Italian meringue.

I separated 3 eggs, hanging onto the yolks for later.

I boiled up 360g sugar with 80g water until it reached 110 degrees.

At this point, I turned the heat up and also started to whisk the egg whites.

When the syrup reached 121 degrees, I whipped it off the heat. The eggs were nice and peaky by this stage.

I poured the syrup (really super slowly - steady stream and all that) into the egg whites whilst whisking slowly until it was all combined.
Tragically, there is no picture of this stage, as, it turns out, it's pretty much impossible to whisk stuff, pouring boiling sugar and take photographs at the same time. Who'd have thunk it...?

I left lovely Kenwood whisking for another 15 minutes or so until the meringue was properly cooled.

When this was done, I chucked some frozen blackcurrants, cherry brandy and lemon juice into the liquidiser and blitzed it all up.
If I'd been a bit more conscientious, I might have sieved the stuff too, but I quite like a bit of roughage in my fruit and am too lazy for sieving, so I didn't...

This was already quite sorbetlicious, but I stuck it in the freezer for a bit to harden up (mixing occasionally, to avoid lump-of-ice syndrome).

When it was nice and frozen, I folded my sorbet into a bowl with (some of) the meringue, refroze a bit

and, hey presto - spoom!

It's very good - like a kind of frozen mousse - not certain that's exactly how it's supposed to be, but I'm not unhappy with the effect...
Might try again some time with a more conventional sorbet!