Yoghurt, honey and pistachio lollies

After tales of the child labour imposed on my brother and I during our summer holidays in my last blog post (sorry mum!!) this time I am recounting much happier summertime memories.

My mum taught me how to cook and most of my culinary skills were taken from watching her at work in the kitchen. Another incredibly important skill that I learnt from my mum was how to be resourceful in the kitchen!! One particular example of this culinary resourcefulness occurred on a particularly hot and sunny day back in those days when we actually got proper summers. Our stock of ice pops in the freezer had been depleted and my brother and I were desperate for a lolly! Due to living at the top of quite a big hill the ice cream van never ventured as far as our house and we were limited on alternative ice cream sources. So my mum came up with the ingenious idea of sticking teaspoons into petit filous that were sitting in the fridge and bunging the little yoghurt pots into the freezer for a couple of hours before removing from the freezer and ripping off the yoghurt pot to be left with a frozen yoghurt on a spoon….genius!

As the bloggers scream for ice cream challenge set by Kavey at Kavey Eats this month is lollies I thought I would take inspiration from my mum and those glorious summer days and have made a slightly more grown up version of the original frozen yoghurt lollies. And the great thing about these is that you don’t need any specialist lolly making equipment or moulds….just some empty yoghurt pots, some tea spoons and some cling film.

INGREDIENTS and EQUIPMENT

The exact quantity of ingredients needed will depend on the size of the yoghurt pots used as moulds but this recipe is based on used 125g yoghurt pots.

Makes 4

4 125g empty yoghurt pots

4 teaspoons

Cling film

500g Greek yoghurt

4 tablespoons honey

80g pistachios

½ teaspoon of orange blossom water or rose water (depending on taste)

Place the yoghurt and honey into a bowl and mix until well combined.

Add the orange blossom water or rose water to the yoghurt mixture and stir together (I thought that traditionally rose water combines best with the pistachio and yoghurt combination of this lolly but I sometimes find rose water a little overpowering so I also tried the recipe out with orange blossom water as an alternative and it worked really well too…so the choice of flavouring is up to you!).

Put the pistachios into a food processor and pulse until the nuts are chopped into small chunks then fold the nuts into the yoghurt mixture until they are evenly distributed throughout the mix.

Distribute the mixture evenly between each of the yoghurt pots and place a teaspoon in each pot.

When we made these as children we always left the lids on the yoghurts and inserted the spoons through the lids to help keep the spoons in place while the lollies are freezing. In this instance because empty yogurt pots are being used as moulds once the spoons have been placed into the pots cover each pot with cling film carefully pushing the end of the spoon though the cling film. Tightly wrap the cling film around the top of the pot so that the spoon is held up vertically. Then place the yoghurt pots in the freezer.

Leave overnight and then remove from the freezer. Remove the cling film from the top of the pots and then with the aid or a pair of kitchen scissors cut away the yogurt pot (I did try to remove the lollies from the yogurt pot moulds without damaging the pots but found it really difficult so ended up just cutting away the pots…but seeing as these are already recycled items I didn’t think it mattered too much!).

Then tuck in and enjoy!

This recipe was inspired by my mum!