Couldn’t tell you why these pops are named after the song by Dee-Lite except that I love it and I made them on my last day here at the beach and I’m working to make sure the groove stays in my heart when we go.
I found some adorable plums in New York City a week ago but was unprepared to purchase a box and walk around with them. Happy to report, they were in my local farm stand and were labeled as sugar plums.
I believe that they are not actually sugar plums. Wikipedia points to “sugar plums” as hard candy made from boiled sugar. There is also reference to a self-pollinating Italian plum that is shaped like a roma tomato (but who ever heard of a self-pollinating Italian anything, I mean really, what about amore?). So this lives on as my ideal sugar plum but I have no idea what it really is. Is that a metaphor for amore? I have a small amount of blueberries and one overripe peach so they are all going into a fruit puree mix. I figure the easiest way to get this useable is to heat it all then figure out how to remove the stones. Here it is pre and post simmer. It turns out that it was a pain to remove the stones from this full mix. Next time would cook plums separately first and maybe use a food mill. When done, it’s getting mixed with cointreau and simple syrup and possibly a swirl of something white and creamy.
Stone Fruit Pops
2 cups fruit puree (I used 1 whole peach, a pint of sugar plums, and 1/3 cup blueberries that were first simmered over medium heat for 10 minutes to soften then strained and blended once cool)
1/2 cup simple syrup
1/2 cup Cointreau
4 tablespoons plain greek yogurt or some other creamy ice cream (goat cheese anyone?)
- Mix the fruit and simple syrup in a saucepan and heat over medium until it simmers. Keep stirring and simmering for 10 minutes until the mix thickens. Whisk in the Cointreau. (Note: I mixed in the cointreau while the puree was still warm to hot and it seemed like the much of the alcohol evaporated. If you were concerned about this, you could add the Cointreau and continue to simmer for a few minutes until it stopped smelling like alcohol).
- For solid pops, fill molds with the fruit puree. For the marbled pops, fill popsicle molds half way with puree, add a tablespoon of yogurt and swirl with a knife. fill with rest of fruit and swirl one more time. Add sticks and freeze.
You may be able to see that these pops seem soft, right out of the mold, even after 24 hours of hardening. I presume that’s because of the relatively large amount of Cointreau. You could omit this, but it was a great consistency and tasted lovely.
So, this is my last post in the frozen files. I managed a frozen thing everyday this month and added some rather quick prose. I’m moving to the foam machine next and will start posting 3x a week. I’m also going to start playing with these posts, so stay tuned. In the meantime, here’s my cutie, who is wondering where the beach has gone and why its so hot.