Double Chocolate Passion Fruit Popsicles

I think there's hardly someone who likes passion fruit more than I do. And raspberries and the combination of both. But I digress. These popsicles were probably the best thing my wicked pastry mind came to think during this hot summer.

In a previous life, when I was working full-time as a pastry chef, I used to make ice cream a lot. But when you're working in a hot kitchen, with everything going strong, it can be very hard to make such things (not to mention tempering chocolate as well. Oh lord.), specially popsicles. The ice cream melts right after it's churned and you're always stuck with ice cream that is too hard to mold or practically melting. I remember going often to the walk-in fridge to work with those to prevent it from completely collapsing.

But to make these at home is another story, much more pleasant though. Unless you live somewhere really hot without AC (been there, done that), it should be fine to make and mold them. Otherwise, you can skip the whole molding part and put both ice cream and filling into a loaf pan or half liter containers and freeze them as is. However, if you do go with the molding part, just make sure you insert the wooden sticks right after putting in the filling just so it stays in the right place and doesn't move much.

And for dipping, here goes another cool tip: if you mix the chocolate with more cocoa butter (I'm using 20% in weight) and melt them both together, the chocolate becomes more fluid and it sticks better to the ice cream without making a too thick coat. I did dip the popsicles three times to make sure they were even (and because who doesn't like more chocolate in their ice cream?) and ended up with a nice coat of chocolate that was just right in thickness.

Any leftover chocolate can be tinted with yellow powdered coloring (or any fat-based food coloring), mixed very well and drizzled on top of the popsicles for decoration.

For the molds, I really recommend silicone molds and ended up using these molds here. I often use Silikomart molds and also own these two models (classic and chic) but they yield less popsicles at a time and I just don't have time anymore to keep coming back and forth for these things. So a mold with more cavities was more convenient for me to handle those.

These recipes yield way more than you'll need for the popsicles. But worry not, just move whatever you don't use for them into half-liter containers and freeze them for later. They will keep well in the freezer for a couple months, but I doubt they will last more than a few days. True story.