The sum of summer Ice pops. Not Popsicles. BY ANDY KING
	Pop starts   You can buy ice pop molds at Target for $2.99 per four-pack. For a snazzy little party item, freeze the mixtures in ice cube trays, and stick toothpicks in them after about two hours of freezing.

When my editor asked me if there was some way of making gourmet Popsicles for a food piece (he must have been inspired by the two-hour break of nice weather this summer), I thought long and hard about ways to spiff up your everyday Popsicle recipes, which I hadn’t made since I was a kid. In fact, I wasn’t sure people really make homemade Popsicles anymore, so I decided to go back to the basics and chop anything haute out of the recipe. So let’s concentrate on the big three categories out of which most Popsicles are born: the fruit flavor, the Fudgesicle, and the Creamsicle.

Incidentally, the word "Popsicle" is actually a brand name, hence the constant capitalization. The original frozen confection (now sold under "Novelties" in the grocery store, which never ceases to amuse me) was invented by — get this! — an 11-year-old named Frank Epperson way back in 1905. Seems the little guy left some fruity soda water on the porch over night in some rare chilly weather in his hometown of San Francisco. The next morning, he had a nice little frozen treat, complete with spoon still sticking out of it, to show off. Eighteen years later, the drip of cold fruit water still refreshing to the tongue of his memory, he patented the "Epsicle."

Why have you never heard of the Epsicle? Because the word "Popsicle," by some marketing demographic glitch between the great wars, was found to be much more attractive to consumers, who also ate up Epperson’s later inventions, the Fudgesicle and the Creamsicle, with great fervor.

So what we’re actually making are ice pops, or whatever. But we’re not making Popsicles. I don’t want to piss anyone off here, you know.

There are a ton of recipes floating around the Internet, and doing a search on "homemade popsicles" will get you a whole lot of results. But I pretty much got the idea of what ratios were, and what worked the best: For fruitier pops, I used equal parts raw fruit and juice, in this case, strawberries, watermelon, and lime juice. The cream pop used not orange juice, but equal parts concentrate and water (orange juice is, what, three to one?), plus a specific amount of vanilla ice cream. The fudge pop is the best: frozen chocolate pudding.

Yeah!

Each mold that I purchased holds about four ounces, so all the recipes — excepting the pudding, which makes a bit more — are enough for eight pops. Each of these mixtures are fantastic to eat unfrozen as well, especially the ice cream and orange concentrate mixture. I downed quite a bit of this, despite the protests of both my intestines and my racing heart.

You can also make your own homemade ingredients rather than buy them. Chocolate pudding from scratch is almost as easy to make as the Jell-o kind (ask your grandmother), and you can make limeade from lime juice, simple syrup, and water. But damned if I don’t really dig the Odwalla Summertime Lime, and damned if I don’t dig the boxed pudding. So that’s what I used. It’s what I would have done 20 years ago, anyway.

Besides, getting down on your knees and seeing the world as a kid isn’t such a bad idea. At least once in a while. Make the popsicles, lick the bowl, complain when someone at the office uses your Chip and Dale’s Rescue Rangers pencil, take a dive down the Crocodile Mile, watch television all day when its 80 degrees and sunny out, eat a whole box of Sour Patch Kids and feel the sickly burn.

It’s summer!

WATERMELON, STRAWBERRY, AND LIME POPSICLE

.5 cup diced strawberries

.5 cup diced watermelon

1 cup Odwalla Summertime Lime Juice

Puree three ingredients with a hand blender, or in a conventional blender, until smooth. Fill molds and freeze.

FUDGESICLE

1 recipe Jell-o chocolate pudding

Make pudding. Fill molds and freeze.

CREAMSICLE

4 oz. orange juice concentrate

4 oz. water

1 cup vanilla ice cream

Puree three ingredients with a hand blender, or in a conventional blender, until smooth. Fill molds and freeze.