Popsicles Good Enough For Grown Ups

Get the Right Equipment

Your mother may have made homemade ice pop using craft sticks and Dixie cups, but that isn’t going to cut it these days. For the best make-at-home popsicles experience, buy a plastic or silicon mold with reusable pop handles. If you remember fondly slurping on freezy pops like Fla-Vor-Ice, similar disposable plastic mold bags are now available online that will let you recreate the experience

Some Ice Pop Rules to Get You Started

Half the fun of popsicles is experimenting with all the different varieties you can create. While you can turn almost any liquid or puree into an ice pop, you should follow a few guidelines:

Rule #1: Adding Alcohol to Pops

Boozy pops are probably the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about adult popsicles, and yes, you can make them, but with an important caveat, you need to know. Since alcohol doesn’t freeze, you need to limit the percentage of liquor to no more than 20 percent of the overall volume of liquid in the pop. However, you may still notice they have a hard time freezing enough to stay on a stick. Solve this problem by macerating fruit in alcohol and adding that to the popsicles.

Rule #2: Keeping Add-ins From Ending Up at the Top of the Pops

Choose horizontal molds or freezy pop tubes if you plan on making lots of pops with add-ins like fruit chunks, chocolate chips, or chopped nuts. Do you only have vertical molds? Try freezing your pops in layers and to better distribute the add-ins.

Rule #3: Storing Popsicles

You can store your homemade ice pops is in the same mold you froze it in, but if you don’t eat them quickly enough, they develop freezer-burn. For longer-term storage, wrap them in the plastic film put them into individual sandwich bags. Keeping unwrapped pops in a single container can cause them to stick together.