Eating Art: Pear Sorbet with Fresh Ginger

As a child, we often went out for ice cream with my parents. Both my parents were raised in India, and dairy was a strong portion of their diet. My father has been known to eat sweet butter straight out of the container. So, they were also incredulous when I eschewed ice cream, with its tongue coating after taste, for sorbet, whose sweet, clean fruitiness I prized.

We recently made a delicious pear sorbet from a recipe from La Mia Cucina (queen of Daring Bakers) but we added 2 T freshly grated ginger and 1 t powdered ginger. One thing that was interesting about the Mia Cucina was that she used canned pears for her sorbet. We decided to do this too because it made for a more creamy sorbet and frankly less work as we were in the midst of creating 10 dishes for our Eating Art Dinner party. But, next time, I might experiment with fresh ones.

For presentation, we served it with candied ginger cut to look like letters (using mini-fondant cutters) as we were making our nod at the how 20th century artists, like Claes Oldenburg, employ letters, words, and cultural symbols in their art.