Patriotic popsicles with a key tip on color

They are bright, tasty, and even patriotic. Every day is a good day for a refreshing fruit-based popsicle, but they are especially choice on patriotic holidays.

We keep popsicles like these stock in our freezer. My boys get excited over the treat and, frankly, it’s a pretty easy and healthy way to treat yourself. As my boys like to say, “We love making them and we love eating them.” You can see in the video below that as much fruit gets eaten before these pops hit the freezer as is in the popsicles themselves. “An excuse to eat blueberries,” indeed.

We make these by filling popsicle forms with fruit and then pouring in lemonade and freezing. Any fruit juice would do but I do like the clear color lemonade provides. Any fruit will do too.

Berries are popular around this house and we’ve experimented with using fresh and frozen berries in these treats. Both end up frozen anyway so you wouldn’t think it would matter. However, the downside to starting with a frozen berry is that it will tend to bleed a little more into the lemonade than will a fresh berry. If that aesthetic does not bother you, then you may be able to save a significant amount of money buying frozen berries.

For the strawberries pictured, I started with a fresh berry and cut them in slices the width of the popsicle forms so that their shape would show well in the finished popsicle. Red raspberries and watermelon wedges are another great red option.

Lemonade Ingredients

For the lemonade, our stock recipe is about 1 1/2 cups of lemon juice to one gallon of water, sweetened to taste with honey. Make sure the honey is well-dissolved and stirred into your drink. It does not need to be particularly sweet for these popsicles, just move it past the “tang” of the plain lemon drink.

Popsicle Steps

At the risk of “overly obvious,” this is how we make the popsicles:

1. Place your first layer of fruit in the bottom of your popsicle mold. Add your second layer of fruit.
2. Pour lemonade into the popsicle mold leaving 1/4 inch or so of room at the top for the popsicle expansion.
3. Shove the popsicle sticks into the fruit, hopefully spearing a larger piece of fruit.
4. Freeze for several hours or until frozen solid.