frozen mango smoothie mess

I probably should have come up with a more exotic name for this dessert like: mango and vanilla yoghurt smoothie ice cream, with crumbled pink peppercorn meringues and raspberries.  But it just felt a bit long. However that is exactly what this was.

I often make smoothies using fat free yoghurt, and I am particularly fond of the vanilla flavoured fat free yohurt from Woolies.  I made a smoothie the other day using pureed fresh mango, vanilla yohurt and a splash of fat free milk, and each sip was pure heaven.

As I was slurping up this smooth and luscious drink, I kept thinking this has to be made into an ice cream. 

So make into in ice cream is exactly what I did.

I pureed a medium / large mango (about 1 1/2 cups of fruit), added about 1 cup of vanilla flavoured fat free yoghurt and a splash of milk and mixed.  I put this through my ice cream machine and then froze until set.

Because I didn’t add any sugar,  the frozen product tasted remarkably ‘unsweet’ compared to its unfrozen counterpart.  Perhaps the brain expects more sugar when eating frozen things. It also lost a bit of its creaminess due to ice crystal formation which is typical of the low fat content products being used.  So on the whole it was just perfect the way it was in it original smoothie form.

However, it was still pretty nice, so how do I make this into a dessert?

It needed more sweetness, so I thought to make an ‘Eton-type-mess’, using the broken up pink peppercorn meringues  that I had made last week, and to finish off with a few fresh raspberries to add tartness and freshness. 

It worked out to be quite delicious and a 100% fat free dessert which went down a treat at my Easter Sunday lunch.

You could use any fruit flavoured ice cream or sorbet but I particularly like the flavour combination of mango and raspberry. Meringues are always wonderful, adding the crunchy texture and sweetness and their pink peppercorn flavour contributed a subtle aromatic dimension.

Hardly the type of dessert for our current wintery weather, but Im a firm believer in ice cream all year round.