A Feast of Fridays: Freeze It! Freeze It In A Baby Soda Bottle!

I’ve already recommended pepper jelly ice cubes to you all, and I still recommend them heartily.  The weather here in southern Indiana is so hot and humid that you can’t have enough cold things within your grasp.

Today I’m going to recommend pepper jelly popsicles.  You can use almost any kind of enclosed container for a frozen pop; I have used small juice glasses, Tupperware frozen pop molds, cheap dollar store molds, and a spoon or stick in each square of an ice cube tray, even.  These all work fine.

My favorite popsicle mold, however, is something rather strange.  Well, strange to be used for this, that is.  I teach hands-on science when I’m not experimenting with pepper jellies in my kitchen, and I own dozens of “baby soda bottles.”  I buy them from Steve Spangler’s website.

These are perfect for so many things in my science job, but they are also absolutely the most perfect popsicle molds I’ve ever used.  Seriously, they’re the perfect shape and size!  They’re tough and almost unbreakable, and dishwasher-safe.  I have several sets, each with its own little rack.  They take up very little space in the freezer, so you have room for several rows of pepper jelly popsicles.  Pepper jelly frozen in these baby soda bottles is also the perfect size and shape to make ices to drop into thermos bottles and those awesome stainless steel drinking glasses with lids.

But mostly, when I’m not using them in my labs, I just fill those baby soda bottles with pepper jelly – or sometimes with fruit juice – or sometimes both – stick a stick in there and let the freezer do its job.

Oh, and by the way?  Do you know why these little beauties are called baby soda bottles?  It’s because they really are baby soda bottles!  Yup, these are what your two-liter pop bottles look like before they’re blown up into two-liter soda pop bottles!  Cool, huh.  Don’t try to make popsicles in a full-grown soda bottle, though.  Use these, or something that’s the approximate size of these.  It’s not that I begrudge you the large popsicle; it’s just that if it’s too big, there’s no way you can eat it all before it melts all over you!

Stay cool, y’all.