Everyone loves a frozen fruit pop, but at the rate my kids would like to eat them in the summer, they could easily make our grocery bill spike! Last summer we picked up some silicone molds, and now one of E5’s favorite activities is making them. I love having control over the ingredients and cost, she love doing it, and the clean-up is easy.
We use two packs of the Lekue molds each batch to get 8 per ~day on the hottest days. They’re small enough that the kids can have a few without me feeling to bothered, and big enough that (at 5 and 8) they don’t feel like its “baby size”. The molds came with plastic sticks–and you can tell that didn’t last long for us. The Norpro sticks have worked really well here. Nice that when these are left in the garden, they eventually decompose.
The most straightforward pops are simply juice or lemonade, frozen, but we’ve found that its quite a lot more fun when you add fruit (and it makes mama happy too). In the pictures we’re using frozen lingon berries simply because thats what we had on hand, but any type of berry works well. Using frozen fruit significantly speeds up the freezing time–helpful when you have an impatient taster on hand!
Everyone wants to help fill the molds. Scooping the berries in is one thing, adding the liquid is another. Enter the baster. On its own, basting is an excellent handwork activity, in the context of fruit pops, its pure fun. And better yet, it almost eliminates spilled liquid.
We like to fill ours with lemonade or limeade, ready-made if we have it, or if we have a lemon on hand, then home made.
Home made:
Juice of one lemon
1.5-2 cups water to taste
1-3 Tsps sugar to taste
Put the lids on (when the lids are on, they stack neatly!) and pop them in the freezer. If you make them in the morning using frozen berries and cold lemonade, they can be frozen and ready by the afternoon the same day!
Enjoy!
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