Food

Flash Freeze: Ice Pops in Ten Minutes

Long gone are the days of the grape-flavored ice pop. There's now a machine that lets you customize the frozen treats with everything from banana slices to graham crackers.

Popsicles are appearing in restaurants, at farmers markets, and at Williams-Sonoma in the form of an ice-pop maker that promises them in less than ten minutes. We gave it a try.

The photos accompanying the Zoku Quick Pop Maker ($49.95) show star cutouts, zigzags, and artfully arranged fruit. We didn’t expect to replicate these fancy pops (what happened to freezing a wooden stick in a cup of grape juice?), but the machine makes them doable.

The seemingly tricky steps—inserting fruit slices or cutouts—are easy because things naturally stick to the pop maker’s frosty walls. The only hard thing is eating the popsicles. When we added, say, lime slices and graham-cracker crumbs as directed by the recipe book ($16.95) to evoke Key-lime pie, we ended up spitting out bits of lime. But stick to more basic recipes, and the popsicle maker is a handy, fast summer substitute for visits from the Good Humor truck.

This article appears in the August 2011 issue of The Washingtonian.

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