Home Made Fruit Snacks

This recipe is so much fun.  There's really no better way to say it than that.  Oh, and it's also ridiculously easy, inexpensive, good for you...and did I mention fun? 

I really hadn't even planned on it being a post here on this little ol' blog.  But a chance find of these cute ice cube molds in the dollar bin at Target (score!) coupled with pinning this recipe just the day before led to me and my three year old son into dabbling in fruit-snack-making a few days ago.  And I can't seem to make myself stop.  Not that anyone around here is complaining.

I, like so many of my friends, am trying to get away from the processed snack foods that clog the supermarket aisles.  I try to find the snacks with the best possible ingredients when I do buy them, but there are still a few that give me pause when I go to put them in my grocery cart.  And fruit snacks (my boys can devour a box in an afternoon) are one of the ones that stand as extremely questionable.  If you can find an ingredient list that actually does contain fruit in some form, the sugar content is still super high and I just can't wrap my mind around the idea of eating carnuba wax.  It just doesn't seem right.  And I can't justify spending upwards of $4 a box on organic, sort of fruity snacks that are loaded with sugar and wax.  Yuck.  Why do kids like these things?

The solution is simple.  Make my own version.  The ingredient list is short and sweet- only four ingredients, all of which I would happily eat myself let alone feed to my kids.  And it takes all of about an hour from start to snacking time.  For a snack that doesn't involve the ingestion of wax, I think I can find the time.  Honestly, if my kids continue to be as enthusiastic about them as they have been over the past few days I will be happy to keep popping these babies out of their cute little molds.  It's the smallest things in life that make them happiest, isn't it?

Home Made Fruit Snacks
Makes about 3 dozen, depending on the size of your molds.  Recipe from An Organic Wife.
For a printable recipe, click here.

This recipe is a very flexible one.  You can use fresh or frozen fruit and whatever flavor your little ones love.  So far I've done strawberry, mixed berry and peach all from frozen organic fruit as it's the middle of winter.  Each is as good as the next and I've had no problem getting any of them to gel.  I used small silicone ice cube molds in fun fruit shapes.  If you can't find molds like this, you can just as easily use a baking dish to mold them flat and then cut the snacks into cubes.  I would recommend a silicone baking pan as they are the best non-stick surface.  You can use a regular baking dish as well, simply line it with parchment paper.

1 1/4 cups coarsely chopped fruit (berries, cherries, mangoes or peaches are a good place to start)
1/4 cup lemon juice
2 tbs honey
1/4 cup unflavored gelatin (this is 1 box of the Knox brand, the one you most often find in supermarkets) *** Edited***  An excellent vegetarian substitute for gelatin is agar-agar.  There are many online sources.

Begin by heating the fruit and lemon juice in a small saucepan until the fruit begins to soften and break down.  You aren't looking to cook the fruit, just make it soft enough to blend smoothly.  Once the fruit is soft, add the honey and blend until smooth.

Whisk the fruit mixture while slowly adding the gelatin.  Continue until all the gelatin has been incorporated.  Don't stop whisking while adding the gelatin or you will have lumpy fruit snacks!

Spoon the fruit mixture into clean, dry molds and refrigerate them until set, up to 1 hour.  Alternatively, pour the mixture into a lined baking pan and refrigerate until set.  Once set, pop the fruit snacks from the molds.  If you used a baking pan to mold your fruit snacks, cut them into 1/2 inch cubes after unmolding the sheet from the pan.  You can store your fruit snacks in the refrigerator or on the counter in an airtight container.