DIY Popsicles

This morning I made popsicles for the kids to enjoy!

My family loves fresh fruit. When it comes to peaches, I purchase as many as I can because it typically takes a while for them to soften up. 

"Typical" flew out the window this past weekend. When I picked up my online grocery order, the peaches were already incredibly soft. We had too many to eat in one sitting. By this morning, they looked baaaaaad. I had a lot of peaches that needed to be used or thrown out RIGHT NOW. 

Not one to throw out useful fruit, I told the girls that we would slice them with bananas for breakfast. You should have seen Giraffe's face! haha

As luck would have it, I was online around that time and noticed that one of my packages from Amazon had been left in the mailbox yesterday. It was my new popsicle kit! :) My plans shifted immediately from using the peaches for breakfast, to using them to break in my new pop molds! :) It was so fun I just have to share!

Since we were already going to pair peaches with bananas, I decided to keep that the same. A quick look in the cupboard confirmed that we still had apricot jello from last November. (I add it to my cranberry sauce.) The three flavors seemed compatible enough, so I sliced up the peaches and bananas. You can tell how ripe they already were.

This is not a pretty picture. haha I assure you, though, that the smell was heavenly! I quickly mashed the peaches and bananas. You can see that I smashed some pretty well and left others in bigger chunks. I figured that the chunks would help with the texture. The idea behind mashing them was to help the flavor and juices incorporate when mixed with the jello.

I only used one cup of water with the jello mix, heating it in my tea pot. Once the mix was dissolved into the water, I added it to the fruit and mixed it together. This is what the mixture looks like after the jello was added. Again, I am aware that it is not a pretty sight. Please excuse that.

Filling the molds was very easy. I chose a wide-mouthed spoon (pictured above) and simply dripped the mix in. I was careful to include extra portions of the soupy part so there would be plenty of that 'popsicle' mouth-feel. All that was left to do was pop them into the freezer and wait! :) 

Who are we kidding? Waiting is the hardest part for both of the kids! haha

This is where I tell you that we took the little bit of fruit/jello mix that remained and used it to top Cheerios for breakfast. That was met with rave reviews in the form of silence. Both little mouths were busy munching! :) My little Koala said afterward that it was the 'yummiest thing I ever eat'. haha

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*** Note: It has been around six hours and I just checked the peach/apricot/banana pops. They are stiffening up but are still too soft to come out of the mold smoothly in one piece. I assume that if I had placed an extra cup of water or juice to accompany the jello/fruit mix, they would have been frozen solid by now. Since I already know what they taste like, I can confirm that they will be well worth the wait! :)

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Update: We ended up waiting until the next day to eat the popsicles. By then, they were ROCK SOLID!!! haha I ran a little bit of hot water over the plastic casing and they slipped right out. They were not only beautiful... they were DELICIOUS! :) The apricot flavor lends itself nicely as the perfect compliment to the peach flavor. The bananas had not browned or decomposed at all. They were these soft, beautifully preserved, fresh chunks. Oh my word, it was SO good! I highly recommend these treats!