How to Make Homemade Bomb Pops
Icy cold popsicles can be a welcome addition to summer gatherings, even more so if you make them yourself in festive colors and interesting flavors. While popsicle-making is a simple endeavor, the range of equipment options for making them is extensive.
Molds for Ice Pops
Tovolo Shooting Star Pop Molds, available at Amazon. My favorite commercial mold.
There are molds made specifically for this purpose that can be purchased this time of year at nearly every grocery, kitchen, and department store. They tend to be fairly inexpensive—usually somewhere between $1 and $20 for a set—and can be reused. Some models come with plastic sticks, which are almost always fitted with a cap that snaps in place over each popsicle cavity, holding the stick upright and in place and preventing prefreeze slops and spills.
After the ice pops made in these molds are frozen and unmolded, the cap-handles catch drips. And, because the sticks and handles are made from smooth plastic, there's no danger of splinters. The main drawback with these molds is that there's a finite number of stick-caps, usually one per pop compartment, so you can only make one batch at a time. Plus, the sticks almost invariably end up chewed and gnarled or just plain lost. (Though kids generally prefer the colorful plastic sticks that the kits come with, a serviceable remedy to the lost-stick issue is wrapping the filled compartments tightly with plastic wrap or tin foil, making a small puncture in the wrap with a paring knife, and then slipping a wooden stick in place through the puncture.)
Of this variety of mold, my pick for 4th of July pops is Tovolo’s Shooting Star Pop Molds (right) which yields a half dozen manageable-sized pops that are star-shaped in section.
