Healthy Ice Cream with a Little Less Mess

It's been a while since I've had this much trouble falling asleep while it's dark out.  I thought that only sleeping five hours today would be ok and I would be able to sleep tonight, but that apparently is not the case.  I guess I was just so tired that those five hours were plenty.  After laying in bed for a very long time I decided to just get out and waste some time online.  It's so infuriating because now all the plans I had for tomorrow will be blown, unless a few hours sleep tonight will be enough to get me through tomorrow.  So I'm up in the middle of the night blogging.

Anyway, it's July and thanks to President Reagen, it's National Ice Cream Month.  Munchkie and I have a real love for ice cream, we could eat it daily.  Probably multiple times a day.  Since that obviously would not be the smartest parenting decision we don't eat it daily and we have been making our own "healthy ice cream."  Munchkie's Mimi gave us two hand churn ice cream makers that we used in my childhood and we've been cranking out our own "Fro Yo" on a regular basis.  It is so easy.  You can do a quick search online for all kinds of ice cream recipes with tons of steps and ingredients.  We go for easy, quick, healthy and delicious here. Two ingredients.  Three steps.  That's it.

Puree the fruit of your choice. Mix with plain lowfat yogurt (or flavored if the plain is too tangy).  Follow instructions for ice cream maker.  Ta Da!

The only problem with this is that the resulting frozen yogurt is quite soft and messy at first, then the leftovers freeze solid and are difficult to scoop out.  I figured that there had to be a happy medium.  Putting together some ideas that I had seen on Pinterest, I made some mess free kid friendly ice cream treats. 

Let me tell you that it takes me a lot longer to wipe down sticky fingers and face than it did to put these together.

1.  Mix together the ice cream or regular old ice cream from the grocery store.  You could also use yogurt and avoid the ice cream maker altogether.

2. Put cupcake liners into a muffin pan.  Of course every kid needs sprinkles on their ice cream, so those go in the bottom of the cupcake liners.

3. Fill the cupcake liners with frozen yogurt or ice cream to however much you want your child to have.

4. Press a cone down into every cupcake liner until it's secure in the muffin pan.

5. Freeze for several hours.

6. Remove each ice cream cone from the muffin tin.  I put them all into a gallon ziplock bag and back into the freezer they went.

7.  Peel off the cupcake liner.

8. Of course there needs to be a cherry on top.

9. See some happy kiddos that don't have ice cream everywhere.  This kiddo didn't want to stop eating long enough to give me a real smile.

This is a great way to control portions and eliminate dishes to clean.  Since we don't have a dishwasher, not having to wash a scooper, spoon or bowl makes me just as happy as Munchkie.  For myself I froze scoops of ice cream into the cupcake liners without the ice cream cones and hold onto the liner while I eat the ice cream.