The ingredients:

OJ, cream, sugar, vanilla. Triscuts are not among the ingredients. I just forgot to put them away.

I used all cream instead of a cream/milk mixture because honestly? We’d just finished our last bit of milk and I was too lazy to open the next carton. I think a mixture would be fine, though I’d use more cream than milk. This pop needs the texture.

Since I was only making one pop (we have a backlog here), I used 1.5 ounces of cream, a healthy splash of vanilla (probably a little less than a teaspoon) and a heaping teaspoon of sugar, though not all of it dissolved and made it into the pop.
The technique was the same as yesterday: pour, pause, suck, pour, wait. It all went smoothly.

When I was a kid, I liked to eat my creamcicles by carefully biting off the orange layer and eating the cream part last. I was delighted to see I could kind of do the same thing with this pop, though not as neatly or completely.

Once again, I had difficulty getting a good shot of the pop’s inside. I really need to figure out the macro function on my camera. In the meantime, here are the best shots I could muster:

These pops tasted great, and they evoked pleasant childhood memories.  I was glad I used a lot of vanilla, because it was necessary to allow the cream center stand apart from the outside of the pop.

This is all a long way of apologizing in advance for the extremely basic nature of today’s pop. It’s just juice:

Since the ingredients were simple, I took the opportunity to try making filled pops again. I thought I could maybe use the translucency of lemonade to make a really interesting filled pop.

To make filled pops, you need to have all of your components ready at the start — in this case, two juices already in easy-pouring cups and the all-important straw. Pour the outside layer and wait until a thin shell freezes. I also poured the lemonade layer a little bit short, so that the orange would show at the bottom.

Use the straw to suck out the still-liquid innards, then fill with the second juice.

As you can see, these pops worked out quite nicely. You can get a sense of how translucent the pops are, and there’s also a hint looking at them that the center is different from the outside. It almost looks like a frosted orange pop.

I tried to get a photo of the inside of the pop, but that was a little difficult. This is the best I could do:

All in all, a nice little pop to end a trying day.

Lemon yogurt, milk, raspberry sauce

The raspberry sauce was leftover from breakfast Sunday morning, and is nothing more than frozen raspberries cooked down with a splash of lemonade. We ate it over pancakes, then I hoarded the rest for pop-making.

This was my second attempt at a “swirl” pop and as you’ll see below, I still don’t have a useful technique down. If I stir enough to evenly distribute the swirl flavor, it generally just blends into the base. I suspect that if I had left the yogurt thicker I would have had a more successful swirl effect, but I didn’t want to take the chance that these pops would stick.

They turned out nice enough, if not exactly how I’d envisioned them:

As for flavor, they weren’t as fantastic as the Pina Colada pops from last week. The lemon flavor was nowhere near as pronounced as the coconut had been, so the pop pretty much tasted like creamy raspberry. Good, but not all I’d hoped they would be.

Anyway, yesterday, my Mother-in-Law loaned me her copy, and I dove right it. If you’ve read it, you know that it’s a quick and absorbing read. so absorbing, in fact, that I stayed up until 2 am to finish it. Oops. Nor the smartest move for a woman with an infant who averages 3-4 hours of sleep a night in the first place.

This is all a long way of explaining why 8:30 pm found me passed out on the sofa. The Husband gently shook me awake to ask if I’d done my ice pop yet. I shot up with a curse, but he said I could go back to sleep; today he’d be in charge of popmaking.

This is what he made:

Apparently, he started with just the V-8, but it was too sweet. So he tried to cut it with the lemonade, but it was still too sweet, so he made some tea and mixed that in.

The resulting pop was great. The tea added a nice dry edge, while the juice flavor and sweetness still shone through. It tasted very similar to Red Zinger tea.

The Husband hit this one out of the park. Guess I should stop swatting him away every time he approaches the Zoku.

Today was one of those days. So when it came time to make today’s pop, all I really wanted was something that would help quench my thirst:

To make up for the simplicity of the ingredients, I decided to put to work all of the lessons I’ve learned so far about making layered pops:

Lesson One: Measure for even layers. For this pop, I decided to freeze my juices (and I use that term loosely, since I’m well aware that both of the beverages I used are actually mostly water and sugar, with a little juice thrown in for flavor) in one-teaspoon stripes.

Lesson Two: Find a neat way to pour. For this, I used the tiny black funnel I mentioned in an earlier post.

Lesson Three:  Be patient. Wait for one layer to freeze completely (or darn close to it) before pouring the next, so the layers stay clean.

Following all of those lessons meant this pop was somewhat more time consuming than usual (it took me a half an hour to make), but the result was great:

Neat, even, beautiful.

Not only was my pop pretty, but it was exactly what I needed tonight. I feel less parched already.

Back on Day 12, I made my first attempt at a Pina Colada pop, and it wasn’t very successful. But last week, my Target had coconut yogurt on clearance (I am a total sucker for clearance sales), so I figured it was time to try again:

Go buy this yogurt, now. Trust me. You'll be glad.

To be honest, I’ve been planning this pop for a week and kept putting off making it. I thought the idea could work, but it wasn’t exactly exciting.  But all of my doubts were dispelled when I tasted the yogurt. This stuff is AMAZING. It tastes exactly like cream of coconut! I actually had to stop myself from just eating it and figuring something else out for today’s ice pop.  But I exercised some self control.

To the yogurt I added about 1/3 of a cup of the juice from the can of pineapples. I also minced one of the pineapple slices, and tossed chunks into the pops as I poured.

These pops nailed it. They tasted just like the pina coladas my dad made (though I confess I have no idea how that compares to the real cocktail). It’s rare that I finish a pop and immediately want another one (I think it’s happened twice before), but I do tonight.  I’m calling this my definitive pina colada ice pop recipe.

I started with a large scoop (about 1/2 cup) of ricotta and the zest and juice of one lemon. I added a generous splash of milk (at least 1/4 cup) and about 2 tablespoons of powdered sugar, then blended the whole thing with a stick blender (my usual tiny food processor was in the dishwasher). I wish I had waited to stir the lemon zest into the blended mixture, so that it would be more prominent in the finished pops. As it was, the pops were fairly undistinguished from the outside, giving little hint of their flavor.

Today’s pop just didn’t work out. I wanted the pops to have a bright, sunny favor, but the lemon juice fell short of accomplishing that. And despite my diligent blending, the consistency of the ricotta gave the pops an almost chalky mouthful.

This is the second ricotta-based pop I have tried, and I haven’t liked either one of them. I think maybe the texture of ricotta doesn’t lend itself to frozen consumption.

But today everything was set, and so:

Frozen strawberries, chocolate, shortening. Not pictured: sugar and water

I started out making a strawberry puree. Since this was definitely meant to be a dessert pop, I added about a tablespoon of sugar to my cup or so of strawberries, plus about 1/4 cup of water to thin out the puree.

I poured the pops using my Valentine’s present from my wonderful husband. He noticed how much I liked my two-cup OXO measuring cup for pouring pops, so he got me two smaller ones so I don’t have to keep washing it out between layers of pops (they have these great pointy spouts that pour really neatly). I love that boy.

Better than any box of chocolates could be.

While the pops were freezing, I mixed up the chocolate. The Zoku blog has a recipe for a chocolate mixture that hardens when it gets cold, and I adapted it (I didn’t have the coconut oil the original recipe calls for, so I used shortening).

Once the pops were frozen, then the fun started. I dipped one on chocolate, I drizzeled one with a spoon, and I used a snipped-off sandwich bag to pipe designs on the third. They each turned out very different, but all really cute:

From left: drizzeled, dipped and piped.

I can’t even tell you how much fun I had decorating these pops, especially the one using the bag to pipe the chocolate on. I liked it so much that I doodled a little heart on my dipped pop.

I feel so artistic now.

The pops were almost as much fun to eat as they were to decorate. I ate the dipped one, and the mixture of chocolate and strawberry was all that I’d hoped it would be. The chocolate did tend to break off of the pop in sheets, but I expect that the drizzled and piped pops won’t have that problem.

Long beofore I ever heard of Zoku, I had put these babies on my Amazon wish list. I liked that they didn’t involve sticks so would theoretically be neater than traditional popsicles (with a toddler involved, neatness is key). They languished on my list for over a year, until Christmas when my husband decided to get me some of the older things from my wish list. Of course, mere moments later, I opened my Zoku and the rest has (so far) been history.

Anyway, I pulled them out today.  For their inaugural run, I stuck with the most basic of the basics — plain old lemonade.  I stood them up in the freezer and walked away.  I wanted to do something basic to get an idea of how the molds worked.

They work pretty well, as it happens.  They weren’t as push-uppy as I’d thought, but I was able to kind of “pop” the pop out of the mold then just hold it from the bottom.  It was neat, clean and easy to eat.  I think these will be great for the kids.  (In fact, I had planned to give these pops to the kids, but then the kindergartener came home with a mountain of Valentine candy and I figured she had enough sweets).

I still prefer the Zoku, but these will more than do in a pinch.

I did that, and the mixture looked promising.  But when I went to remove the pops, I started having problems.  Instead of that little “click” that comes right before my pop starts lifting out, there was a “pop” and then the remover-screw just started spinning around.  I took it off, and the stick had pulled out of the pop.  I put the Zoku in the freezer in the hope that getting the pops really, really frozen would make them come out.

10 minutes later, and it was clear that my pops weren’t coming out.  Next I tried to kind of spackle the pops together using milk, on the theory that the milk would freeze and bond the sticks back to the pops.  No dice.  The most successful of those attempts ended up like this:

So for the second time, I’m left letting the Zoku thaw so I can clean it out.  I’m bummed, because I had plans for a very cool Valentine’s Day pop tomorrow.  I’m going to have to adjust that plan…