Day 19 — Shooting Star Ice Pops

Today’s pops are all about the pretty.

The other day, I watched a youtube tutorial on making decorated ice pops in the Zoku. As usual, the technique involved special gadgets that can be purchased from Zoku and also as usual, I am too cheap to buy them. But the pops in the video were adorable, so I decided to see what I could do with what I have on hand.

Basically, to make decorated pops, you need two things: 1) the actual decorations, and 2) a way to get them into the ice pop molds neatly. I had apples to make the decorations, and for the second part, I had these:

Pie server, fondant cutter. The cute pop dream team for cheap folks.

I figured the flat, relatively wide surface of the pie server would allow me to assemble my design, then stick it to the Zoku mold all at once, rather than blindly sticking things into the mold at random.

I went with a shooting star theme, using the tiny fondant cutter in the photo above. I’d gotten it in a set of star-shaped cutters I bought back when I thought I’d send my daughter cute lunches every day (the closest I actually get is scratching notes onto her bananas).  Even before I cut anything out, I was grinning.  Something about that tiny little star reminds me so much of those little Hello Kitty twins.

Anyway, I cut some slices of apple and punched out a handful of star shapes, then immediately immersed them in lemonade so they wouldn’t brown. Once I was ready to make the pops (I had some camera issues and these pesky kids needed such frivolities as dinner and an adult to put them to bed, so there was about an hour’s delay), I assembled my stars on the pie server:

See how cute?

 

Anyway, once the design was assembled, I turned the Zoku up on its side, slid the pie server into the mold, then pressed it to the side of the mold for a few seconds.  I tried three designs: a shooting star trail, random polka-stars, and a line of stars going straight down the middle of the pop.

And that’s when I noticed a potential issue. See, being neither terribly bright nor wallowing in free time, I had sliced my apple  haphazardly, resulting in stars of varying thicknesses. When making my designs, I needed to make sure I used stars of similar thickness, so they’d all have a chance to adhere to the molds. This was a pain in the rear, and also not entirely successful.  Next time, I’ll slice the apple across the core so there’s more surface area in each slice and I won’t have to worry as much about uniform thickness.

None of the designs worked exactly as I’d hoped, but there is clearly a lot of potential there:

Even imperfect, it's still very cute.

Scattered stars were an abject failure. They slid, they fell, they stuck in the wrong places. Boo.

My "line" also got scattered, but at least it was messy in a cute way.

At this point, though my cheap little heart hates to admit it, I suspect the results would be much better with the tool designed specifically for this purpose. The pie server worked ok, but its shape not enough of a fit to the molds to allow me the place the decorations as precisely as I’d have liked to. As it turned out, I lost a few stars when they slid off the server or froze too near the tops of the molds. I would also have liked to see a better distribution of decorations across the tops of the ice pops, but the server didn’t seem to reach exactly where I wanted it to.

The base of these pops, by the way, was cranberry juice mixed with lemonade. The pops were tasty, with a pleasantly icy (as opposed to creamy) texture. The apples added both flavor and texture to the finished pops, plus they looked so darn cute!  I was sorely tempted to keep experimenting, but I still have about 340 days to go, so it’ll have to wait…