Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Tasty Frozen Treat


When you cut way down on sugar and saturated fats, then things like pie, cake, cookies, and ice cream get hard to find without they taste like sawdust and cardboard. So my wife came up with a frozen bar that I love ...


Get some of those home popsicle forms, you've seen those, basically a hollow plastic fudgesicle-shaped container with a stick that goes in it. We use something like these:



The recipe:

A 14 oz. can of coconut milk, a same-sized can of pineapple chunks; two medium bananas; a little under two tablespoons of sugar; a dash of cherry juice.( If you are looking for a creamier texture, a teaspoon of guar or xanthan gum, which will give you fewer ice crystals.)

Pour off the pineapple juice and dump the chunks into a blender. Add the coconut milk, the bananas (good idea to chop them up a bit), the sugar and cherry juice. Turn the blender on. Let it run until the mixture becomes smooth.

Warning: Keep the top on the blender jar until you turn the motor off, please. 

Pour it into the molds. It makes enough to fill six of them, with enough left over to mostly fill an ice tray. Stick 'em in the freezer until they are set, that can take anywhere from a couple to three or four hours, depending on how much other stuff you have in there. The ice cubes you can toss back into the blender with some fruit or juice or whatever to make smoothies. (Or, you can put them into a glass and pour rum over them, which makes for an interesting and quite tasty tropical rum cooler–if it lasts long enough for the cubes to melt into it.)



To get the bar out of the mold, stick it under the kitchen faucet and run water on it for a few seconds, turning it this way and that. 

We totaled the ingredients and divided them out and it's about 116 calories each, just under 7 grams of fat, with 10 grams of sugar. Not bad for a once-a-day habit. Compare this to a Haagen Dazs bar with almonds, at 320 calories, 12 grams of fat, and 20 grams of sugar.

Enjoy. 

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