Pudding Pops!

I've never mentioned it before on this blog, but I have been signed up for SparkPeople for a while. I don't use it very often, but I do get recipes emailed to me every day. Most of them get put in the circular file of my email account (haha), but some make it into the "SparkPeople Recipes Folder" that I have. :)

One of the recipes that made it to the "SparkPeople Recipes Folder" is their recipe for Frozen Pudding Pops. As you can imagine, I am all about sweet frozen treats (see also Diet...Ice Cream??), so the recipe's promise of a low-fat frozen snack that you can actually make yourself sounded like a fun 'challenge.' Soooooo I picked up a packet of Trader Joe's Instant Chocolate Pudding (sigh, here I go again promoting TJ's, but really I haven't been to P&S in forever!) on my last grocery run. But any sort of pudding mix will do- next time I may try a Jell-O pudding mix. ;)

Anywho, according to the recipe, just make the pudding according to directions, then put the pudding into either a popsicle mold or just paper cups with popsicle sticks. Since I'm attempting to be more conscious of buying things I can reuse versus just throw away, I was hopeful of finding a popsicle mold, but wasn't sure where I would find one. Let me tell you, today was my lucky day! I was at the Dollar Tree picking up cleaning supplies (including some Totally Awesome Laundry Detergent which I'm linking to because I probably wouldn't have believed that this was in fact the brand name either....but I digress) and I thought to myself that I should check into buying some paper cups and popsicle sticks. I was perusing the aisles when I actually found a popsicle mold! Score one for me....

So I mixed up the batch of pudding- it probably took about 12 minutes altogether before the pudding was set, and 10 of those minutes were waiting. I put the pudding into my spiffy new popsicle mold and then rummaged around in my freezer to find some space to set the mold so it wasn't tipping over or anything. The jury is out on how they will taste frozen, but the pudding itself was quite tasty :)

Caloric breakdown:

Per the pudding box, serving size is 1/2 cup prepared with 4 servings. I made the whole box, so I'll quadruple the calories. 1 serving = 110 calories, 5 calories from fat, with 1g fat and 0g saturated fat, 23g carbohydrate with 19g of sugar. Calories for the whole box = 440. The recipe called for 2 cups of milk, and 2 cups of skim milk has 160 calories. Total calories for the pudding mix = 600. I figure I used about 1/3 of the total to make my pudding pops, so 200 calories for all of the pops, and there were 8 pops made, so 25 calories each. Not bad...not bad. :)