20 Great Popsicle Recipes to Help You Stay Cool (2024)

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May 10, 2023 By Lisa Sharp 1 Comment

A great way to stay cool? Try these delicious popsicle recipes. There are so many wonderful options and all are easy to make and the perfect summer treat.

There are so many things to love about summer. My birthday is in the summer, there are fun events, and I love the longer days. One thing I don’t enjoy is being hot and sweaty. Lately, it’s been in the upper 90s, and humid so hot and sweaty is how I spend a lot of my time. So how do I cool off? Well, one of my favorite ways is with a popsicle.

As a kid, those popsicles were either Otter Pops or homemade popsicles made out of Kool-Aid. Both options were always a welcome way to cool off.

The History of Popsicles

If you’ve never read the history of popsicles it’s actually really interesting. They were actually invited by a kid named Frank Epperson on accident.

He mixed sugary soda powder with water and left it out overnight. It was a cold night so the mixture had frozen by the morning. When he tried the frozen treat he decided it was delicious and started to sell this treat around the neighborhood.

In 1923, Epperson expanded his sales and started selling them at a nearby amusem*nt park. His treat at that time was called Epistles. After continued success, Epperson applied for a patent. Epperson’s children are the ones that encouraged the name change to Pop’s ‘Sicle or as we now know them, popsicles.

You can read this whole story over on NPR. The story does put my neighborhood lemonade stands from childhood to shame.

Making Homemade Popsicles

I started making popsicles as a kid, back in the lemonade stand days because a kid can’t live on lemonade alone. Those days I used plastic molds that had a straw at the bottle to drink the liquid as it melted, that was the best part. As I said earlier, I usually made these out of Kool-Aid.

I went a while not making them because I didn’t want to use plastic molds since plastic can contain chemicals that aren’t good for us.Studies have even shown BPA-free plastic still leaches synthetic estrogens, even when not exposed to heat which has been known to cause plastics to leach.Elevated levels of estrogen are linked to all kinds of health concerns, including increased breast cancer risks in women.

Thankfully there are some great stainless steel popsicle molds.They are really easy to clean as they are dishwasher safe and of course, they are safer. There are now two different styles to choose from. You can also get silicone popsicle molds. I have both kinds and really like both. The silicone ones can be a bit easier to use, at least when it comes to removing the popsicles from the molds.

If you are short on time you can just pour some juice in the molds, or Kool-Aid like I did as a kid in the 90s, and call it good but there are also some pretty amazing recipes out there. I want to try and make a lot of these great recipes this summer.