Healthy Plum ice popsicles
Healthy and popular ice cream for kids ?!?
An impossible combination? No, actually not – and it is really, really easy to make too!
Over time, my kids have become, as you might imagine, quite … discerning when it comes to ice cream. Luckily, the majority of flavours to which they have been exposed have met with their approval. But I readily admit that I still was not prepared for the huge successes recently with ‘simple’ ice pops (or ‘ice lollies’, if you prefer British English).
And guess what? Some did not even contain any added sugar!
The wildly popular Plum & banana popsicles, prepared without any added sugar
Today’s Plum ice popsicle – both popular and healthy – was actually the result of a rather failed ice cream experiment.
One of my favourite bloggers had posted a recipe for healthy plum sorbet. The recipe only called for sweet plums and some lemon juice – how nice, pure and healthy it seemed … I decided to give it a try, despite certain rational misgivings. Well, perhaps the plums she had been using had been of a particularly super-sweet type, but my test batch ended up tasting pretty much like frozen plum purée, pretty much devoid of sweetness. In my view, the recipe simply needed more sweetening than what the plums alone could provide.
Delicious plums … and the “pure sorbet” looks very nice, doesn’t it? Too bad that it simply was not sweet enough to really appreciate …
Then it hit me – I could use the rest of the “natural plum sorbet base” and make ice pops out of it!
But it would still need more sweetening. Being somewhat disappointed (by the rather unsuccessful ‘healthy sorbet’) but still in a healthy mood, I decided not to add any pure sugar. Instead, I reached for a couple of very ripe bananas! Recalling one of my earliest posts, the bananas would hopefully be able to fill in the missing sweetness. I mashed them together with the plums, filled the moulds, put them in the freezer and waited.
Did it work? Yes – definitely!
Popular beyond expectations … despite the lack of added sugar
The pops – devoid of any added sugar – were wildly popular with the kids! Since they were so incredibly easy to make (like most pops), I even felt somewhat embarrassed that I had not been making more ice pops in the past. Well, you can rest assured that I will try to make up for it from now on – there is little reason to buy ice pops when you can make better ones yourself, even with only a minimum of effort:-)
- About 3-6 plums, as sweet and ripe as possible
- 2-3 bananas, also as ripe as possible
- (possibly about ½ teaspoon lemon juice)
- Blanch the plums in boiling water for a minute or so.Take them up and let them cool a bit.
- Peel the skin (save for a few spots you might want to keep for looks), cut or rip the plums in halves and discard the pits.
- Cut the bananas in pieces, blend them with the plums and mix everything together thoroughly (preferably using a mixer, blender, or similar).
- Pour the resulting mixture into the ice pop moulds.
- Wait at least 5-6 hours, or preferably over night, to let the pops freeze properly.
- Obviously, if you churn the banana-plum-mixture in your ice cream machine for a while before filling up the moulds with it, you may shorten the time of preparation considerably:-)
Wow. This is amazing. I cannot believe this is possible. I will test it on my daughter, but plums are not in the best shape here, I have to wait a little.. I like reading your blog very much!
Hi Katerina! So glad to hear you like reading the blog. And yes, I was also quite surprised to see how popular these “fruits-only” pops turned out to be. I hope that your daughter will appreciate them too (just remember to add the ripe bananas;-)
I did see/read that there was a serving size along with the recipe, about how many does the recipe make?
Hi Christine,
It depends a lot on the size of your moulds and – obviously – exact how many bananas and plums you use.
If you would like to make a rough estimate, it takes about 3 medium-sized bananas to get 1 cup (about 250 ml) of mashed bananas.
That was pretty cool and looks good