Day 2 of blueberry madness!

Popsicle buttons found here.

So, what do you do with a pile of blueberries?  Today, I made popsicles and cupcakes.  The popsicles were my own wacky creation, but the cupcake were a recipe from "Deceptively Delicious".

And what have we learned about my cooking so far?  That's right, I can't resist trying to stick something green in almost everything!  With the success of the spinach-blueberry bars last week, I thought it was safe to try the spinach-blueberry cheesecake-filled cupcakes.  After all, according to the recipe, "Kids love the surprise creamy center!"

Unfortunately, this may be the first "healthy" recipe that I am too disappointed in to even serve to my children.

First, let's talk about success!  Yesterday, I mentioned the kale-blueberry chewy smoothie fiasco.  I probably should have mentioned that I can't throw food away.  So, I decided to make another attempt at popsicles.  This time, I made fruity rocket pops!

I'm afraid I didn't measure much, but here's the rough recipe:

Red layer:  Strawberries, yogurt, ice, splash of cranberry juice, about 1/8th cup of sugar

White layer:  Bananas and yogurt (I use Stonyfield Farm Organic Whole Milk Vanilla...after all, my kids are not on a diet!)

Blue layer:  Blueberries, yogurt, handful of kale, ice, about 1/4 cup sugar.  (As I mentioned yesterday, this mix came out chewy.  If I do it again, I'll either cook the kale, use my mini-food processor...or both!)

I used these popsicle makers from IKEA:

Found here.

First, I poured the red in, and filled it about 1/3 full.  I put the popsicle cups in the freezer, without the sticks, and let them set for about 5 mins.

Next, I added the white.  Since I didn't add ice, there was less of the white mix, which worked out well for fitting it all in!  Back in the freezer, no sticks, for another 5 mins.

Last, I added the blue, put the sticks in, and froze overnight.

Here is the result:

As you can tell from the picture, I didn't have time to grab the camera before they dove in!

Two thumbs up from the littles!




And, back to the cupcakes.

I should mention, to be fair to the cookbook, I did make one substitution.  I did not have pureed yellow squash for the cream cheese filling, so I substituted apple sauce.  Still, I don't think applesauce caused this fail.

Here's what it looked like when I first tried to get one out of the pan:

Ewwwwwwwwww.

I put the remaining cupcakes back in the oven for an additional 10 mins.

And this is what they look like now:

Ummmm...

So, as I'm writing, I'm waiting for them to cool.  After dinner, I will attempt to serve these to my children.  I might not have even tried, but they saw me making them and have been asking if they are cool enough to eat since before they went in the oven!

According to my husband, if they taste better than they look, they would be great for Halloween.  What do you think?  Add a hat and call them witch cakes?  Or maybe a twiggy pretzel and they could be swamp mud cakes.

In a first for this blog, you're going to have to wait to hear the verdict!  The bigs are back from their 4th of July getaway to Montana tonight, so hopefully I'll have a chance to get more than two opinions...that is...if I can talk them into trying them!