Spiced Fresh Orange and Honey Sorbet

With a new ice cream maker, I've been looking up interesting frozen dessert recipes. We started by just throwing a carton of coconut yogurt into the ice cream maker, which resulted in a lovely, slightly tart frozen yogurt with flakes of coconut. After that success, I wanted to try something a little more interesting, and a look at the spice rack showed me that I have not been very good about using my cardamom pods. So here's something that does use them! I halved the original recipe but decided to include both star anise and cardamom, and the original amount of ginger because I love ginger. Next time I would skip the sugar, and just use loads of fresh ginger instead of ginger conserve, as I think the orange juice and honey were sweet enough.

Spiced Fresh Orange and Honey Sorbet

Adapted from Epicurious

Ingredients

1.5 cups water
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup clover honey
1 tablespoon finely grated orange peel
1/4 cup ginger conserve
1 whole star anise

1 cardamom pod
1 whole clove
1 small bay leaf
1 cups chilled fresh orange juice
1.5 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

Method

Combine first 9 ingredients in heavy large saucepan. Bring to boil over medium-high heat, stirring until sugar dissolves. Boil until syrup is thick and mixture is reduced to 1 cups, about 12 minutes. Discard bay leaf; cool syrup.

Strain syrup into medium bowl. Add orange juice and lemon juice. Transfer to ice cream maker and process according to manufacturer's instructions. Transfer sorbet to container, cover, and freeze until firm, at least 6 hours and up to 3 days.