Making Fruit Popsicles

It’s about time for another recipe! Once spring shows up, I am ready for sunshine, and with sunshine comes ice cream. However, since the birth of my daughter, I’ve really started paying attention to what we eat, and looking for alternatives to sweets with all the extra sugar. Enter fruit popsicles. These have been a favorite around here since my miss was old enough to have them. They take some prep time, but they are so worth it!

You’ll need:

• A food processor
• Spatula
• A small sieve/strainer and spoon
• Paring knife
• Fruit
• Any additional flavorings (I used chocolate sauce, peanut butter, and Nutella)
• Popsicle molds/forms

Gather all your fruit. I used strawberries, raspberries, and bananas for mine – all the house faves!

I made the raspberries first. Put a bunch in the food processor – I didn’t measure, but I’d say I used about 1 Cup worth.

Since mine were frozen, I had to stop and scrape the edges several times, and I added in a bit of hot water to thaw them as they processed, and made a puree.

Now, the tedious part. Sieving out the seeds. I put scoopfuls of the raspberry puree into the sieve, and mashed it all around with a spoon repeatedly until only seeds were left. It takes time, but is so worth it to have lovely smooth popsicles.

Then I poured it into my popsicle molds. I made one just plain raspberry, then filled the other halfway so I could mix it with strawberry.

Then I started on strawberries! After taking off the stems, toss them in the food processor until you get a puree.

Then sieve just like the raspberries. For the strawberry, I filled the rest of the half-raspberry to make a mixed berry pop, and filled another empty halfway to make strawberry-banana.

For the rest, I mixed it with some chocolate sauce to make a chocolate-strawberry pop – YUM!

Onto bananas, which seemed so easy since there are no seeds to sieve out! Just puree and go. Banana is my favorite, so I made the most variety.

From top left, clockwise: Banana-chocolate-peanut butter, strawberry banana, banana-chocolate, and banana-Nutella.

And there you have it! Toss in the freezer for a few hours, or overnight as we did, and you have a delicious not-too-sweet treat. We use all natural peanut butter, so there is no added sugar there. The chocolate syrup does have sugar, but since I homemake that too (click here for the recipe I use!) at least there is no HFCS!

The best part is, my little thinks we are having ice cream popsicles, and thinks it’s the biggest treat to just have one in the afternoon. She watches me make them, but any frozen treat to her is ‘ice cream’ so that’s a bonus!

I hope you enjoy some – let me know what fruit combos you use! I have yet to try kiwi, but I think it could be delicious!

-Kayly