Raspberry Melba Sauce

Difficulty: easy
Time consuming: not at all

Raspberry Melba sauce is great in so many ways. It's tart. It's smooth. And it's bursting with tangy raspberry flavor that compliments so many dishes.

Recently, I've used it to top vanilla ice cream. The sweetness from the ice cream and the tartness from the sauce makes a great treat after dinner. My mom uses it to drizzle raspberry deliciousness on peach pie. My husband drizzled the rich red sauce on vanilla cheesecake. Last year, my mom and I whisked it into buttercream and used it to sandwich between macarons.

Which brings me to now. I made up a batch of sauce (which yields about 10 ounces) to flavor some buttercream. The Melba sauce gives buttercream a rich, sweet and tangy, raspberry flavor that is far from artificial. Another perk to using raspberry Melba sauce instead of preserves is that it strains out all the seeds so the resulting frosting is nothing but silky smooth.

The recipe

Ingredients
10 oz frozen raspberries, thawed; or 1 cup fresh raspberries
1/2 cup Red currant jelly(this is what the original recipe called for, but I bet it would be equally as tasty using raspberry, strawberry, or another jelly)
1 tablespoon water
1 1/2 teaspoon cornstarch

Directions
1. Combine water and cornstarch in a small bowl or cup to make a slurry. Set aside.

2. Combine raspberries and jelly in a medium sauce pan. Set over medium heat and stir until raspberries break down.

3. Add cornstarch slurry to raspberry. Continue to cook and stir until sauce is thickened.

4. Either refrigerate until cool then strain through a fine wire mesh sieve set over a bowl or glass measuring cup. Or if you're impatient like me, strain it immediately, just be careful because its hot. Strain sauce from seeds by stirring gently in sieve.

I stored my sauce in a squeeze bottle I bought for flooding iced sugar cookies so that I could sauce cakes, pies, and ice creams easier.

See how I used this sauce for cookies in a few days! You won't wanna miss it!!