I got an ice cream machine for Christmas and feel as excited as the little girl that gets her first bicycle. This is going to change my (culinary) life forever. It makes ice cream in 20 minutes. Perfect, smooth ice cream. For years I have been trying to make good ice cream without a machine and I have achieved some decent results, but the machine is better. Way better. I so enjoy using it that my only problem at moment is how to eat all the ice cream I make. Quite a pleasurable problem to have, needless to say.

I have always loved ice cream, and it is my absolute favourite dessert. Nothing beats good ice cream at the end of a meal. Some of my fondest memories from childhood are about ice cream. I clearly remember tasting real Italian ice cream in Rome on a family holiday when I was five years old, and I still can’t help but keep the cute little plastic spoons you get when you buy a cup of ice cream. My favourite ice cream as a child was the simple Co-op (well, the Swedish equivalent) orange sorbet that my mother used to buy in 500 ml packets.

She cut them in half, paper packaging and all, and me and my sisters scooped the ice cream straight out of the packet. It was divine. A smooth, sweet and slightly tangy orange sorbet. No wonder perhaps that one of the first ice creams I made with the new machine was an orange sorbet. Do not despair if you don’t have an ice cream machine. It is perfectly possible to make a good sorbet without one too. All you need to do is to keep stirring the sorbet as it is setting in the freezer and follow my special tip in the recipe below.

Makes about 1 liter frozen ice cream

• 500 ml freshly squeezed orange juice
• Juice from 1 lemon
• 350 ml water
• 120 g sugar
• 50 g honey
• 2 sheets of gelatine (2×20 g)

Soak the gelatine sheets in cold water for about 10 minutes. In the meantime, bring water, sugar and honey to the boil and simmer until the sugar and honey have dissolved. Put the soaked gelatine sheets in the warm sugar mix and stir.

Pour the fresh orange and lemon juice into the mix and stir. Put in the fridge to cool, possibly overnight. Pour into the ice cream maker and follow machine instructions until sorbet is done. It should be solid but fluffy.

If you do not have an ice cream machine you pour the cold sorbet mixture into a freezing container and put in the freezer, then stir vigorously every 2 hours. Special tip: When it is almost completely set, take the mixture out of the freezer and pour into a bowl, then work it for a minute with an electrical hand mixer until the it becomes fluffy.  Pour back into freezer container and leave to freeze until solid. If you do this at the right time the result is almost as good as with an ice cream machine.

Enjoy!