Zoku is so kuul

The Princess Cupcake and I have been admiring the Zoku Pop Maker in the Williams Sonoma catalog for some time.

She has told me over and over which monster pops she’s going to make.

And they look pretty darn complicated from the photo:

But I was wrong.

In case you’re utterly confused, Zoku is a quick freeze popcicle maker. You can make gourmet pops with all healthy (or not if you choose to) ingredients in only 7 minutes. Well, add on some prep time, but you get my drift. No more high fructose corn syrup or frozen juice in ice trays for us.

This was a Mommy Upgrade of epic frozen treat proportions, and one of which I think my dietitian buddies would approve. I picked up the pop maker and the monster kit a couple weekends ago and the Princess Cupcake squealed with delight when she saw it. She was over the moon excited to make faces in her pink popcicles. And we needed to do it right NOW.

Little did I know, there’s no plug.

So here are my suggestions:

1. Get one of these. They are the healthy, creative, family fun alternative to frozen crap from the grocery store. You know EXACTLY what’s going in them, and if it happens to be oreos, then that’s between you and your guilty-conscious.
2. Don’t show your kids what you got until you’ve frozen the maker for 24 hours in the freezer because as you might guess, 3 year olds work solely on instant gratification. Luckily, they also just like playing with plastic pieces and boxes so I was able to use some stall tactics until ours was ready to use the next day.
3. Read the recipes WHEN you freeze the maker so you have time to get all the ingredients. I didn’t and when we went to make them, I realized that I was not prepared for the pops I had only 5 minutes earlier been drooling over in the cookbook. (Yep, got the cookbook too, and the freezer holder and extra sticks…. I am all in.) I did however, have a strawberry banana smoothie in the fridge so we used that with apple slices for the face thanks to a donation from the neighbor next door.
4. Go the the Zoku blog before you try to make something elaborate. Our eyeballs kept sliding and not going where I wanted them to on the side of the pop. Turns out honey is an easy fix to hold your eyeballs in place on the popcicle eyeball affixer tool. And there are tons of recipes there too.
5. Make your face upside down or else your smiley face might look like Mickey Mouse. Rookie mistake not noticed by the Princess.

Even the hubs was completely impressed with our pops, some with faces, some with fresh blueberries… And he’s a Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla kinda guy.  My opinion – no, Zoku has no idea I wrote this and they haven’t sent me anything to shower them with kind words (although if they wanted to I wouldn’t be offended…) — this is something every family with young kids should have. Not only can you make it uber nutritious, (think fresh fruit purees or squeezed juices), you can have a ton of fun while making them. It definitely has the Princess Cupcake stamp of approval.