Cooking with Talia: Zoku Pops and More

While Mr. Mari and I were in Florida for the holidays, our niece, Talia, wanted to bake something with me. What she didn't know was the Christmas present Mr. Mari and I were giving her would end up being the project we worked on together.

Talia wanted a Zoku Quick Pop maker for Christmas. Owning one myself, I knew it would be a lot of fun to do together. There were seven of us so we needed to make two Zoku batches as well as use some non-Zoku ice pop molds since the Zoku's freezing solution would definitely be too warm for a third round. We decided on making striped creamsicles with clementine segments in each orange layer for the first round and then a more traditional version, with a vanilla core. We started with this recipe from Small Kitchen College, primarily because there was an image of striped popsicles and the lemon zest made the recipe sound more interesting than just using straight up orange juice concentrate. I swear we didn't coordinate our t-shirts!

Well, we had some issues. One of the things I should have remembered from making Zoku pops in the past is everything needs to be cold, super cold. Especially if you're planning on making two batches with some pattern to them. It probably also didn't help that we kept opening and closing the freezer to get ice out. 

As I mentioned earlier, since we needed a seventh ice pop, Talia made some in traditional Popsicle molds using the remaining vanilla yogurt from the recipe with added frozen fruit AND she made apple cider pops too. She saved the day by making extra since the Zoku ones, although tasty were pretty sad looking.

(Images from top: Talia holding an apple cider and a vanilla yogurt with raspberries ice pops; making the different fillings; using an extra handle to push a peeled clementine segment down; sucking out some orange juice mixture to make room for the vanilla yogurt center core; carefully pouring in some vanilla yogurt mixture; our [sad] Zoku pops; Talia's successful pops)