It’s rhubarb season, so anyone lucky enough to have a rhubarb plant at the bottom of th garden should be able to make this delicious treat really easily.
if you don’t have rhubarb, you can use pretty much any fruit- frozen, fresh or tinned (though I’m not sure banana would work- more on that another time...).
Cut your fruit into smallish chunks
Then add enough sugar to make the fruit a bit too sweet- things taste less sweet when frozen.
Rhubarb is very sour so needs a lot of sugar. Pretty much any other fruit will need less than this!
if your fruit is already soft (like defrosted strawberries, raspberries etc) then mash it up and refrigerate.
If your fruit is hard, such as this rhubarb, microwave until soft. You may need to add some water to apples or pears to make a smoothie-like consistency. Rhubarb is goes watery as it cooks so don’t add water!
If you don’t have a microwave, you can cook the fruit on a hob (add a little water so it doesn’t stick) or in a covered dish in the oven.
It should end up like this (this took 10 minutes in a really old 900W microwave):
Make sure you stir it while it’s hot to mix in any sugar that has sunk to the bottom and help it dissolve.
Let the fruit cool to room temperature , then refrigerate until chilled.
If you have lolly cases, fill them with fruit then freeze- or if you don’t have cases or fancy a posh pudding, you can make granita with just the dish you’ve already used, a freezer and a fork.
For granita:
Put the dish of chilled sweet fruit into the freezer and stir with a fork every half hour to hour, especially scraping the ice off the sides of the dish into the middle.
After 4-5 hours, you’ll have fluffy delicious fruit granita ready to serve. You can help it freeze faster by putting the chilled mix into a wide, shallow metal baking tray which will conduct the heat out of the fruit more efficiently if you want to eat it sooner than that.
Eat straight away, or put into a tub to leave in the freezer. You’ll probably need to leave it at room temperature for 10-15 minutes before serving in this case, depending how much sugar you put into it- the more sugar, the softer it will generally stay.
Enjoy!
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