Mango Coconut Striped Popsicles

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Mango Coconut Striped Popsicles

Mango Coconut Striped Popsicles

We are in the midst of the dog days of summer. The days are long, the sun is bright, and the nights are cool and fresh. In the summer, I'm drawn to fresh foods, light dinners, and chilled treats. Though my usual desserts during the summer are ripe fruits, some days I just need something a little different. While ice cream can be oh so nice, sometimes it's just too rich to eat by the side of the pool.

I recently rediscovered popsicles after buying a popsicle mold. For the last few years I simply haven't found any hidden away in the freezer, but I can already tell it is going to get plenty of use (especially this summer).

Mango Coconut Striped Popsicles Mango Coconut Striped Popsicles

When I was growing up, popsicles were part of the daily culture at daycare. After playing outside all afternoon under the hot sun, my daycare provider would show up in the backyard with a box of popsicles in half a dozen flavors. She'd watch as we carefully made our color selection, breaking up the arguments that popped up when everyone decided they wanted the same flavor. Back then, popsicles weren't about the flavors, they were all about the colors.

Blue was my favorite flavor simply because it would dye my lips and tongue a bright shade of the sea—a fun accessory for any seven year old.

Mango Coconut Striped Popsicles

Most days we'd eat them on the front steps, trying to eat them faster than they could melt, a respectable feat on the warmest of days. Other days we were foolish and we'd let our popsicles melt completely in the sun, in their little plastic tubes, until they had turned into a very expensive Kool-aid. We would down the sweet juice in seconds, curiously wishing we had more.

Nowadays I savor popsicles, licking them instead of biting, hoping they last into a little slice of forever.

Mango Coconut Striped Popsicles

These Mango Coconut Striped Popsicles have a bold and fresh taste. The popsicles alternate between flavors of mango, coconut, and orange; the variety is clean and energizing, which keeps your taste buds on their toes. The alternating stripes of flavor and color are fun. Though it does take a little longer to make these popsicles because of the freezing time between stripes, the final product is gorgeous and the flavors are lovely. This is a lovely treat to cool you down on a hot summer afternoon.

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Summer Berry Pavlova

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Summer Berry Pavlova

Summer Berry Pavlova

Heat is oppressive. It wasn't until this summer that I fully began to understand the effects of a never-ending swelter. With a heatwave lasting the length of the sunny season bearing down on me, cool air has seemingly become a luxury of the past. I now realize just how often I took air conditioning (and a hundred other little things) for granted since I moved into a new apartment in a new city.

I used to think heat was glamorous. After reading books set in the deep south such as The Secret Life of Bees and watching movies like Gone With the Wind, my perspective has become skewed. I imagine pretty girls in patterned dresses drinking lemonade on the back porch and fanning themselves with a good book to stave off the sultriness of summer.

Oh, was I wrong.

Summer Berry Pavlova

My apartment is on the top floor of a building; when temperatures rise, the heat in the building rises, and I'm left with a kitchen that could pass for a sauna. The blazing sun has become an unwelcome sight in my windows. Keeping the blinds closed has become something of a survival tactic, as my apartment converts into a stifled cave when I struggle to keep out the heat. I have a small wall air conditioner, but it is useless against the rising heat of the building, scarcely lowering the temperature after running for most of the day.

The heat rarely registers below ninety degrees in my living room and I am starting to understand how food roasting in the oven must feel. At night the temperature impossibly rises as I strip the bed of sheets and fall into a fitful sleep in the path of an industrial fan. I've suffered bouts of heat exhaustion simply from lying on the couch in a heat induced stupor for too long, exhausted and dehydrated from doing absolutely nothing.

Summer Berry Pavlova

There is nothing glamorous about heat. I couldn't have been more wrong in my fantasies of the women of the south and their glasses of lemonade and magazine fans. Now, after living in my own little "deep south," I can appreciate how much people do suffer in the heat, with humidity so high that it suffocates and air so still it feels like a boa constrictor slowing wrapping itself around your body. Heat is really just sweat, frizzy hair, and dreams of crawling into the freezer next to the frozen vegetables.

Last weekend, my parents held a small summer party and I offered to make a couple desserts. Outside in the hot summer air, these Summer Berry Pavlovas were a cool treat to serve and impress. They are light and delicate, which is a lovely quality during the dog days of summer when a bowl of cold cereal is good enough to call dinner.

Summer Berry Pavlova

This Summer Berry Pavlova is sweet, light, and fresh. The pavlova is a large meringue with a crisp exterior and a soft, marshmallow-like interior. When the pavolva cools, the center collapses, revealing a cavity that is filled with a white chocolate whipped cream. The pavlova is topped with fresh raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries, with white chocolate shavings and a dusting of powdered sugar. These are a cool delight when the heat is high and friends are near.

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Almond Butter Cupcakes with Mocha Buttercream

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Almond Butter Cupcakes with Mocha Buttercream

Almond Butter Cupcakes with Mocha Buttercream

Growing up, I was a picky eater, especially when it came to tree nuts. I avoided them during my childhood and teenage years simply because they looked "gross" to me. Each Christmas, my father would get a jar of mixed nuts wrapped up in a bow. He'd offer them to me to give a try and I'd turn him down. Though nuts were frequently found in the cupboards and in desserts at family get-togethers, I was so frustratingly picky I wouldn't give them a chance.

Not a single one.

Almond Butter Cupcakes with Mocha Buttercream Almond Butter Cupcakes with Mocha Buttercream

I visited an allergist for the first time after my tongue swelled up like a balloon after eating fresh kiwi in a middle school Beginning Foods course. As long as we were there, my mother and I decided to test for a slew of random foods, animals, and plants. Most notable was my allergy for cats (already known) and, surprisingly, tree nuts. In fact, my arm grew so angry red and swollen, the allergist immediately wrote me out a prescription for adrenaline. I was severely allergic to most tree nuts and never knew it.

Since that day, I've landed myself in the emergency room ICU from a single, accidental bite of an "oatmeal raisin" (macadamia nut) cookie. I've developed the early symptoms of an allergic reaction when I'm in a room where other people are eating pecans just from breathing in the microscopic pieces hovering in the air. I've interrogated many bakers and cooks what exactly is in the food they make hoping that, unlike a particular lady and a "chocolate cake" incident (Oh, hazelnuts are a nut? Whoops.), they'll let me know what to avoid.

In a twisted piece of fate, the fact that I was such a frustratingly picky eater growing up may have saved my life.

Almond Butter Cupcakes with Mocha Buttercream

Even so, I've always been inexplicably drawn to almonds. I remember moments of guilty pleasures when I'd sneak a few chocolate covered almonds from the cupboard before my parents came home from work. Though I am supposed to avoid all tree nuts as a precaution towards cross contamination, I am technically (and oddly) not allergic to almonds. If you pay attention to the sheer number of almond recipes on this website, you may think of me as either rebellious or an unnecessary risk taker.

However, if I wasn't a bit of a rebel, these cupcakes wouldn't exist and oh boy am I glad they exist.

Almond Butter Cupcakes with Mocha Buttercream

Almond Butter Cupcakes with Mocha Buttercream are dark, gorgeous, and unexpected. The cupcakes are made with almond butter, which lends a texture to the cupcake that is both light and dense, while just barely sticking to the roof of your mouth. Frosted with a rich mocha buttercream, the flavors compliment one another immensely, making it impossible to eat just one. The almond flavor in these cupcakes is very real (no almond extract involved), which sets them apart from other almond cupcake recipes.

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