Celebrate July 4th with Homemade Popsicles

If you're expecting a sunny 4th of July, you'll need some cool treats to help you celebrate until the evening's fireworks.  Carla Emery shares her recipes for easy and delicious homemade popsicles.

These are cheap, easy, and even more fun for children than going to the store. Children like strong, sweet juices like grape and cranberry for popsicles—but when kids are hot, anything will do. My little ones enjoy goat’s milk popsicles. Popsicle making is a nice way to use leftover juices from canned fruit, too.

OF HANDLES AND MOLDS

You can use wooden sticks for handles and sturdy small bowls or cans for containers—work up a collection. Or buy popsicle molds; Tupperware and Back to Basics carry them. If you have a big family or lots of small friends, I recommend getting at least 2 molds so you can have one freezing while they are consuming the other. You can even make parfait popsicles by freezing a layer of one color and then a layer of another color. My plastic holders soon got lost or fell apart, but then we substituted sticks in a bowl or can and were fine. Fill the molds not quite full, insert your holder, and freeze.

UNMOLDING

Don’t let the gremlins pull the holders until you’re sure the center of the popsicle is solidly frozen and you have loosened the sides by running hot water over the back of the mold. Otherwise they might pull out the holder prematurely, leaving a hole that it won’t freeze back into. You don’t have to unmold all the popsicles at once. Just loosen as many as you need. Refill the emptied units and return to the freezer.

BASIC FRUIT POPSICLES

Puree 1 cup any kind of fruit or a mixture of fruit and mix with 1 cup water. Pour into your ice cube tray. When they are starting to freeze, add a wooden stick or toothpick to each section. 

PUDDING POPSICLES

Susan Staley was in Germany when she sent me this recipe. She said, “If your children love the Fudgsicle-type popsicle, you can easily make them. Just make up a batch of pudding and freeze it in your popsicle molds. They’re delicious and you can make different kinds beside chocolate. Butterscotch is very good. In fact, any flavor of pudding your children love hot, they’re bound to like cold in hot summer weather.”

ANY FRUIT ICE

You could juice pomegranates or barberries or red currants, or cook and strain quinces, or grate pineapple, or boil and pulp apples or rhubarb—whatever you have. Sweeten to taste, add lemon juice if the flavor needs it, and freeze.

GINGER ALE JUICE

Combine ¾ cup sugar and 2 cups water. Heat and boil 5 minutes. Cool. Add 1 cup orange juice, ½ cup lemon juice, and 2 bottles ginger ale. Freeze.

As American as Apple...Cider?

The apple pie has long served as an emblem for all things American, right alongside the Stars and Stripes, the Liberty Bell, and the great golden arches of Mickey D’s. However, the Founding Fathers as well as the rest of Colonial America were more apt to take their apples in a different form: cider. John Adams confessed to starting each day with a “gill” (about a half cup) of hard cider, while Thomas Jefferson ensured that homemade cider was always on the table at Monticello. What better way then to celebrate the fruits of their brave efforts this Independence Day than to indulge in a little homemade cider of your very own?

Unpressed Cider

You’ll need about a bushel of apples to make each 2-2½ gal. cider (or “juice”). Any kind of apples can be used, and you can try different blends for the sweetness-tartness qualities you prefer. Professional cider makers or serious hobbyists can get really picky about how much of what kind of apple, but hey, it’s all apple juice. The important thing is to find a way to make use of what you have. In general, good eating apples are also the best cider apples. The only apples you seriously shouldn’t use are sprayed apples, partly rotten apples, or apples that have been lying on the ground very long.

Fortunately for most of us, it’s not necessary to have a cider press to make cider. Just clean and cut your apples, making sure to cut out any wormholes. Usually it’s handiest to cut all the apples in two pieces as you go, in order to get at the wormholes. Cut out rotten spots or scarred places where the apple rubbed against the tree. It isn’t necessary to take out the seeds. Then put the apple pieces through a grinder or chopper, saving all the juice. Squeeze your grindings through a strong cloth bag, and voilà! Apple cider!

For those who like their cider in a more solid form, here’s a delicious recipe for apple cider butter that’s great on toast, pancakes, or waffles:

Old-Fashioned Apple Cider Butter

This is the traditional apple butter made of pared apples boiled down with cider. Boil 6 c. apple cider in an enamel or stainless-steel pan. (Optional: For extra redness start with 12 c. cider and boil it down to 6 c.) While the cider is boiling down, core and quarter about 10 lb. of apples. Add apples when the cider is ready and continue cooking slowly until they’re tender. Put it through your colander. Put your butter back into the pan and add 1 ½ c. brown sugar (or more to taste—it depends some on the sweetness of your apple variety). Optional: add ½ t. ground cinnamon, ¼ t. allspice, ¼ t. cloves, and a pinch of salt. Continue cooking over very low heat, stirring a lot, until the cider and sauce do not separate when a spoonful is placed on a plate. Then pour into containers for canning or preserving.

If drinking (or eating!) cider to observe the national holiday just isn’t enough, try this inspiring read from Sasquatch Books: