Instructions

1. Steam the beet until a knife slides in without resistance, then let it cool before it goes in the blender. Hot puree thins out and spreads well past wherever you pour it.
2. Hold back a few spoonfuls of the mango before blending anything. Dripped onto the finished red sheet and dragged through with a skewer, it gives a marbled garnish rather than a flat one.
3. Blend the beet, strawberries and vanilla seeds until completely smooth, then taste it. Beet varies enormously in sweetness, and this is your only chance to correct it with more mango.
4. Spread the puree across a lined tray at 1/4", right out to the edges of the mat. An even depth is what lets every shard you cut later have the same firmness.
5. Dehydrate at 115 °F for 4 hours, which is deliberately short. A garnish has to bend around a glass rim, so this comes off long before it would be finished as a fruit leather.
6. Test it by lifting one corner and curling it around a finger: it should hold the curl without cracking. If it cracks, it has gone too far to shape and is better cut flat into shards.
7. Cut twists, discs or shards while the sheet is warm, and slit each one so it can straddle a glass rim. Cutting it cold tears it.
8. Build the drink first and add the garnish last, sitting above the ice. Anything resting in the liquid softens and drops in within ten minutes or so.
9. Keep spares flat between sheets of parchment paper in a sealed tin in the fridge for a week. This is a short-life garnish by design: the moisture still in it is exactly what makes it foldable.