A Popsicle By Any Other Name

We have special dish soap that smiles at us

 This is what my tiny upstairs freezer looks like. Turfed are the bags of frozen peas and corn, the odd salmon burger, even the bags of almonds and walnuts. All have been banished to the downstairs freezer to make room for our motley collection of popsicle molds.

By the way, if anyone wants to mail me some of those bar-type molds (think commercial Fudgesicle), I'm ready and willing. 

At the moment, as you can see, we're going with the Mix N Match Mantra. This gets mildly awkward when some are filled and some are being washed or some haven't been washed because some of us don't think washing popsicle molds or sticks fall under the category of Doing The Dishes when it's their turn. Management is working on this.

But I digress. The other day our local newspaper featured a new book about Ice Pops (which look suspiciously like popsicles). I don't know why the plain old popsicle is now known as an Ice Pop, and I'm slightly concerned that it's going to be another in a long line of Renaming Annoyances For Sheila (ie: starfish sea star, UPS Brown, Straight of Juan de Fuca Salish Sea), but the recipes looked so interesting I decided to overlook the name thing for the moment. Besides, I ignore Irritating New Name Changes for the most part.

The book is called 200 Best Ice Pop Recipe (I'm hoping that missing S is just a typo) and it's written by Andrew Chase. I read the article with breakfast, salivated over the idea of all those weird flavour additions, then went out and looked for more popsicle molds so we could try the featured recipes. Tragically, and rather irritatingly, I discovered that I've "missed the window" for purchasing such objects. Who knew there was a WINDOW for buying popsicle molds in big box stores? Isn't that why they ARE big box stores? So they can STORE THINGS I MIGHT NEED at some point in time?

In the end, I came home with 100 plastic cups and a bag of popsicle sticks (or should we call them Ice Pop sticks?). 

There were three recipes featured: Raspberry Meringue Ice Pops, Fudge Ice Pops, and Margarita Ice Pops. Here are the Raspberry and Fudge versions sitting in my downstairs freezer, awaiting their gustatory fate.

We're going to make the Margarita version once our Lemon Verbena Simple Syrup is cooled down (it's going to sub for the Triple Sec as I don't have any and I'm too cheap to go buy a bottle just for 1.5 tablespoons of the stuff).

Here's a close-up, just to torment you.













Here is the Raspberry Meringue out of its little cup.

(Hand model: Max)

Doesn't that look mouth-watering? I'll torment you a little further with the description from the newspaper:

"Italian meringue is a cooked meringue with a thick, silky texture. It is often used as a base for European-style sorbets..."

Just in case you're wondering, it IS silky and thick.

Dueling Popsicles