I hear the words ‘summertime’, ‘kids’ and ‘dessert’ and I immediately think ice cream.  I’m sure my kids do too.  I have to admit, there’s always a gallon or two in our freezer.  Lately, however, I’ve wanted to find a dessert that they’re excited about having and I’m excited about giving them.

Enter my oldest daughter.  She loves to bake.  I mean LOVES.  Cookies, cakes, bars, cupcakes, you name it – she bakes it.  But my husband will not allow our oven to be turned on through the months of June, July, and August.  That kind of puts a damper on the baking.

One late afternoon, I opened my freezer to pull out meat for dinner.  There was a cookie sheet in there with pink blobs all over it.  I asked my oldest, and she said “I’m making frozen yogurt drops”.  Okay.  I admit I was quite skeptical.  Her three younger siblings rush for ice cream, cookies, pies – but yogurt?  How simple.

They were hesitant to try it.  Once they did, they gobbled it up before the little drops could melt.  I was still skeptical though; perhaps this was just a new intriguing notion for them, to be shunned if repeated.

I was so wrong.  My eldest did it again, freezing cherry yogurt this time.  Two of her siblings don’t even like cherry yogurt all that much, and the drops were gone within minutes.

Have we found it?  At the grocery store the other day they begged me for various kinds of yogurt to try.  I gladly obliged; finally a dessert that I was excited about giving them (because I’m not thrilled to give them sweets all the time) and a dessert they were excited to get (because fresh fruit just isn’t that exciting for dessert when you’re 7).

I think it’s a combination of things – the little drops are fun to eat.  They can pick and choose they’re flavors.  They know I’ll let them have the entire cookie sheet (so they think they’re getting a lot of dessert).

So stop buying frozen yogurt!  Grab some, scoop it out of the container into a plastic bag, cut off the tip of the bag, and squirt drops onto a cookie sheet.  Freeze for a couple hours. Watch your little ones gobble them up.

How easy.  How come I didn’t think of this sooner?  Sometimes I try so hard to make things so complicated and the easiest things are the best.