With the hot summer days in Sacramento, sometimes you just need to cool off with a tasty, homemade cold treat.

Frozen fruit popsicles are easy to make with fresh fruit purees and a little creativity.

You can use any kind of fruit with this popsicle recipe – adding sugar will make the popsicles taste sweeter.

If you prefer not to use sugar for these tasty popsicles, I recommend using stevia, which is a natural sweetener ingredient from South America.

This recipe was adapted from the skinnytaste.com recipe, “Frozen Mango, Kiwi, Raspberry Pops.”

Frozen Mango, Strawberry and Blueberry-Raspberry Pops

Servings: 4

• 9 tablespoons water

• 2 tablespoon sugar or stevia

• 1 mango, peeled

• 4 ounces fresh strawberries

• 6 ounces fresh raspberries

• 3 ounces fresh blueberries

• 4 small 5 ounce plastic cups

• 4 popsicle sticks

In a small saucepan, combine the sugar and water and bring to a boil.

Boil water four to five minutes on medium heat and set aside. This is called “simple syrup”.

Puree each fruit separately in a blender and place each pureed fruit into three separate bowls. For the raspberries and blueberries, blend them together in the blender to make a raspberry-blueberry puree.

Mix the syrup into each bowl of pureed fruit.

Take the small cups and equally fill them with the strawberry puree and place in the freezer. Freeze for one hour. This will be the first layer of the popsicles.

Next, pour the mango puree on top of the frozen strawberry puree and freeze for 20 minutes.

Insert popsicle sticks and freeze for two hours.

Pour the raspberry-blueberry puree on top of the frozen mango puree and freeze popsicles overnight.

These popsicles can be refreshing and fun to make for summer parties or for a snack during a hot afternoon.

Brittany Lambert can be reached at [email protected]