Sunday Cook: Berry Popsicles

Another Sunday Cook is upon us. Today, COOK is very loosely used. Who the heck wants to cook in this heat?! Not I!

And thank goodness that

BERRY SEASON HAS ARRIVED!
Berries are VERY popular in this house and we are thrilled to have native berries here at the park just begging to be picked. We have both Saskatoon Berries and Black Raspberries. The park is filled with Saskatoons but there is only ONE raspberry bush at ONE of the sites. We collectively hold our breaths each night hoping that a camper doesn't park in that ONE site and find our berry stash. So far so good! No one has found our bush, campers have parked in it a few times, but thankfully they miss the raspberries!

The Black or Whitebark Raspberries. 

We all help in picking - ours go into the bowl - guess where Cassia's go!

With the temperature at around 40ºC (104ºF) here today, we certainly needed something to keep us cool. I would have made homemade popsicles this summer but this task was put on high priority when Cassia and I were reading one of her books about colour the other night. There in the ORANGE section were three yummy looking popsicles. Pretty soon I was promising Cassia popsicles (boy was she surprised when they weren't orange!)


Just like many things - popsicles can (and should) be homemade. Why oh why would you want to buy popsicles full of sugar and artificial colours. Not us. Ok, ok - everything in moderation right. Well, sure - I do have to confess a complete soft spot for Creamsicles - orange colouring and all.


But with all the berry picking that has been going on - BERRY POPSICLES were the flavour of choice.


So, here we go.....

This is the first Sunday Cook without much of a recipe. It's really quite simple.....

Collect your fruit - for ours I used fresh Cherries that we just purchased from Hilltop Gardens - our local fruit stand (you'll be seeing lots of pictures from there this summer), and the berries we collected. I also added some frozen berries.

Place them all in a blender....

and blend!

Pour in the molds - add the sticks as my little assistant is doing here - and freeze.

That was for a straight on berry popsicle. Inspired by some the popsicles on my pinterest frozen treats board I decided to make a creamy berry popsicle. Again I just went by feel - I read a few recipes and then opened the fridge and went for it.

In a bowl I mixed yogurt, honey, fruit and.....

creamed coconut. 
On our last shopping trip I decided to go this route instead of the canned coconut milk. I've been reading some not so good things about the can lining. I do have several recipes pinned to make homemade coconut milk but it's still on my to do list. I thought this was a good fill in for the time being.

I didn't stir the mixture too much so that the berries and the yogurt would still somewhat separate.

VOILA!

And just because I am a COMPLETE crazy women I also made chocolate. Derek thought he was ahead of the game when he took some of his chocolate almond milk and poured it into the molds and froze. Hmmmm - not so great - none of us were impressed. 

No problem - a bit of research on pinterest and I found this recipe for Homemade Fudge Pops - it seems to have been making the rounds on different blogs so I went back to the original post by Brown Eyed Baker for the recipe.

If you LOVE FUDGESICLES you'll LOVE these! 

Promise!

Cassia was pretty impressed with herself - she had HER chocolate popsicle and then somehow talked me out of the rest of MY berry cream popsicle. 

Melts a mom's heart!

The last 48 hours or so have been pretty smoky here in the valley. Apparently most of southern BC is under the smoke of the fires in the USA. At first we thought it was a local fire. By this evening most had dissipated. It was actually much worse then the pictures show.

Thanks for stoppin' to see what today's Sunday Cook had in store. 

I hope you give the popsicles are try. There are so so so many options as far as flavours. Next up for us either orange or pineapple - or maybe I'll mix them. 

Then again, Kiwi were on sale......

Teresa

Today's Interesting Link: If you missed the link above for my 'frozen treats' pinterest board here it is again (if you are ever looking for me that's where I spend too much a great deal of my time). I have a ton of links pinned not only for popsicles but other yummy frozen treats and desserts, such as homemade ice cream (another item on my TO DO list), perfect to beat the summer heat and for entertaining.