Sugar Swings! Serve Some: Homemade Fruit Snacks

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Monday, November 4, 2013

Homemade Fruit Snacks


Do your kids love fruit snacks as much as mine do? For some reason mine are always begging for those store bought character fruit snacks with all those bad ingredients like corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, food colorings, various waxes and gums.  But they love them, so as an alternative I tried some homemade ones made from this stuff:


CasCal is a natural fermented soda that made from all natural ingredients. I've had it for awhile so not even sure it's still available.  It came in neat flavors like cherry rose and chocolate, mango jasmine and kaffir lime, lemongrass tangerine and pineapple, pear apricot and magnolia, and black current tangerine and lemon so I thought it would be great to use to make some of the homemade fruit snacks.

For these you need some gelatin, the soda base and some sugar, as well as some candy molds.  I found this recipe on Mommy Savers and just used the natural fruit soda for the flavoring.


Add 1/3 cup of the soda (or whatever drink/juice you'd like to make these from) to a sauce pan and sprinkle 2 envelopes of gelatin over.  Let sit a couple minutes.  I also added about 1 tablespoonful of sugar and heated everything over medium until all dissolved.  Put the mix into something you can pour from, and pour into molds.  


Let sit until firm or put in the refrigerator to speed this up.  This worked great and it was easier to pop the snacks out of the mold when they were cold.


I have all kinds of ice cube trays and molds I've collected over the years so it was great to use these for the fruit snacks too. Almost as cute as those store bought fruit snacks.  OK no Monsters U or Star Wars characters but still cute.



And the kid's reaction? At first good and they ate them up, but when I asked them about what they liked better, these homemade ones or the store bought.  They picked the store bought {insert sad face with sad trombone sound}.  The homemade definitely had a good flavor but the texture is not the same as those others, it must be the wax or guar gum ingredients that give them more of a candy chewy texture, and these are more of a delicate flavor with a harder gelatin texture.  Maybe I just need to experiment with the recipe a bit more.  If anyone has any better experience with homemade fruit snacks, please share!

Thanks for stopping by and hello to November.  Beautiful weather here in the northeast AND today is my 18 year anniversary (I know 18 years, how the heck did that happen?!).  The time flies by when you are married to your best friend, happy anniversary hon!!!

4 comments :

  1. Yum! My kids also love fruit snacks. We'll have to try these. Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I made homemade fruit snack and my kiddoes also picked the store bought ones. :( I thought they were yummy.

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