When my daughter was about 3, she started asking for ice pops at every meal. I’m not sure how I did it, but I’d created a pop-ster. And though it’s probably not a good parenting practice to simply hand your kid what they’re asking for all the time, it was easy enough to do.
I started with one of Wirecutter’s pop-mold picks, the Zoku Fish Pop Molds, in 2022. (She was in a sea-creature phase, and these molds give you six different oceanic shapes to choose from.) I filled the molds with cranberry-apple juice, and she was thrilled.
But I wanted to be able to bring pops on the go, and the fish pops couldn’t really leave our home without melting everywhere. After quickly burning through several big boxes of the “healthy” version of my childhood favorite, Otter Pops, which are more self-contained than the pop molds I’d been using, I realized that all I needed was a portable mold to replace that little plastic bag. And though I don’t remember exactly how I stumbled upon them, I’ve turned into a mom hero thanks to the Chef’n Sweet Spot Ice Pops.
These silicone molds with an attached lid turn anything—from leftover yogurt and smoothies to juice—into a frozen pop that you can take on the go.
I haven’t comparatively tested pop molds the way Wirecutter’s kitchen team has for our guide to pop molds, but this style of mold is a bit more elusive. (This kind isn’t a fit for our guide, which covers molds that make multiple pops at a time in a tray.) Searching for “portable pop mold” on Amazon turns up a sea of unhelpful results, but you can find other, similar-style molds available for around the same price as the Sweet Spot molds, which come in packs of six for $14.
These stood out to me because they had the top connected to the mold itself with a tiny built-in tether. I know myself, and keeping track of tiny, coin-sized caps is not going to happen. And so far, my daughter hasn’t lost a single one.
On top of creating something that my child actually likes to eat, these molds have helped me avoid wasting delicious food I’ve spent my hard-earned money on.
Have a big, fancy, freshly made (or, bless your heart, store-bought) smoothie, and don’t want to waste what your kid didn’t drink? Put it in a pop. Got only a couple of spoonfuls left of a cup of yogurt? Put it in a pop. Berries about to go bad in the fridge? Put them in a pop and top them with some lemonade or juice. In the rare case where my kid doesn’t finish an ice cream, I’ve added it to a pop to let the treat live another day.
I’ve found that these don’t leak when I put them in the freezer horizontally, but I do prefer the results when I can freeze the pops vertically in between the wire freezer-shelf grates since this allows the pop to freeze with a flat top. The way you do it will depend on what kind of freezer you have, but I moved a few months ago and have switched to always freezing the pops horizontally without any messy disasters.
Washing is easy, in part thanks to that attached cap. Just rinse the mold and place it over a tine in the top rack of the dishwasher. Textured ingredients like flax, chia, or even lingering tiny seeds of strawberries require a little more elbow grease, though. When I conferred with a colleague and mom-of-three who also owns the molds, she laughed. “Flax or chia?! I’m pouring lemonade directly from the Trader Joe’s container into these.”
I recently ordered one of the many portable pop mold dupes from Amazon, an eight-pack of Mirenlife Silicone Ice Pop Molds, for a quick comparison, and as I suspected, the molds’ detached tops were tough to keep track of. They’re also bigger than my precious Chef’n pop molds, and I find them not as easy to hold. But they’re just as leak-resistant and quite sturdy.
Not all pop recipes work well in these molds, in my experience. One of my daughter’s favorite snacks is homemade gelatin (a simple combo of whatever juice we have on hand and Thrive Market grass-fed gelatin), and I thought that letting the mixture solidify in the pop would be a real treat.
Alas, it was too gummy, and it stuck to the sides of the pop, totally un-pushable. So my daughter and I dug the goop out with a dinner knife—and she dragged me. “Well, that was a bad idea, mom!” Can’t win ’em all.
This article was edited by Hannah Rimm and Maxine Builder.
