Day 194 — Rainbow Ice Pops (natural(ish) style)

Since I made those red, white & blue ice pops last week, I’ve been thinking about making a full-on rainbow ice pop. Trouble is, I don’t really like using artificial colors to make ice pops. I (and my kids) get enough of those in our daily allowance of Cheetos and there doesn’t seem to be much point to my adding more. So I decided that for my first try at a rainbow ice pop, I needed to at least try to make the majority of the colors come from actual juice. That means a lot of different juices:

Cherry juice for red, orange juice for obvious reasons, pineapple juice for yellow, green smoothie for green, lemonade and food coloring for blue, V-8 Fusion for purple. I decided y’all didn’t really need to see indigo.

You’ll note that there’s no blue juice there. For one thing, I ran out of the blueberry smoothie I had last week. For another, no fruit or fruit juice I”ve ever used actually comes close to the color blue I associate with the rainbow. So I abandoned my principles a little and used some blue food coloring. And while I was at it, I colored the V-8 juice for the purple, too. The actual juice, while purple-ish, had too much of a red tint for what I wanted.

The pop turned out pretty, though not as vibrant or clean as I’d wanted:

I wish the green had been a less muddy color, specifically.  But still, not bad for a pop made mostly out of unsweetened fruit juices.  One of these days, I’ll try it the artificial way just for comparison’s sake.

Day 162 — Pina Colada Ice Pops (with rum)

A few months ago I made, and raved about, pina colada ice pops with coconut yogurt. At the time, I thought it would be kind of weird to mix alcohol and yogurt, so I made them virgin pops. Today I decided to see what would happen if I added the rum:

I mixed the entire cup of yogurt (6 oz) with about a half cup of pineapple juice and two tablespoons of the rum. It made a lot of base, around 11 ounces worth (what a shocker. 6 oz + 4oz + 1 oz somehow added up to 11 ounces!). I poured three pops, then added a good slug of rum to the remaining base and guzzled it while I waited for my pops to freeze.  That’s hwo I can tell you that this makes a lovely drink, too.

These pops were great.  They stayed relatively soft, but were firm enough to pull out of the Zoku easily.  I actually think I could maybe have gotten away with using a little more rum than I did,but what was there gave the pops a nice little kick and a shot of flavor.  I can imagine sitting out on the deck, looking at the lake and eating one of these ice pops.

Day 137 — Sunny Striped Ice Pops

My two youngest children are still sick, so we’re still all about hydrating over here. But at least I can make that hydration pretty:

I wanted to do a pop that was different tones of the same color, so I chose lemonade, pineapple juice and orange juice. I propped the Zoku up on a book and poured my layers. They came out cute:

Lemonade on top, pineapple in the middle, orange on the bottom.

These days, I rarely make a full batch of pops, but I did for these. They were fun to make and to eat, despite the fact that they were just made of juice. Sometimes, simple is really all you need.