Paula Deen's Watermelon Granita

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A few weeks ago, Paula Deen was on The Rachel Ray Show showing fun recipes to celebrate the 4th of July. One of the recipes was a Watermelon Granita, and I just had to try it (especially since I had just purchased a watermelon!)

This recipe was rather simple, but also a little tricky. I'll explain in a min, but the recipe goes like this:

Ingredients:

-- 8 cups chopped fresh watermelon
-- 1/2 cup water
-- 1/2 cup sugar
-- 2 tablespoons fresh lime juice

Directions:
In the work bowl of a food processor, process watermelon until smooth. Strain through a fine sieve, reserving 4 cups juice. Discard solids.

In a small saucepan, combine water and sugar. Bring to a boil, and boil for 3 minutes or until sugar dissolves. Let cool completely.

In a large bowl, combine reserved watermelon juice, simple syrup and lime juice. Pour into a 13x9-inch baking pan, and place in freezer. Freeze for 6 hours or until no liquid remains, scraping with a fork every 2 hours.

My advice:
So, first of all, I had a smaller watermelon, and I only got about 4 cups of cut watermelon and 2 cups of juice, so I just halved the recipe, and it worked out. Also, I substituted Splenda for the sugar, and you could not tell the difference, and it's basically now sugar free (except for the natural sugar in the fruit). Also, the Splenda dissolves very quickly, so I just heated the water in the microwave (about 1 min for the small amount I had to use) and then added the Splenda, and it dissolved immediatly (thus saving the time to boil water). 
 
The tricky part is that you need to continue to scrap the ice mixture. The recipe says to scrape every 2 hours, but it froze rather quickly, so I had to actually scrape every hour. I really only needed to scrape it about 2 or 3 times and it was pretty frozen.
 
It is very tastey, and a great light, summery treat. I highly recommend you try it!