The Unexpected Addition That Makes The Creamiest Chocolate Popsicles

If you want to make your own chocolate popsicles at home and are in search of the perfect recipe, there's one ingredient that you should be keeping an eye out for — and it may come as a surprise to you: silken tofu. Yep, silken tofu, combined with chocolate, makes for one creamy, delicious treat.

Silken tofu is actually used in sweets more often than you might expect, such as in dairy-free ice cream. It's perfect for adding creaminess to vegan desserts that can't use milk or heavy cream, but it can be used in non-vegan recipes as well to add extra richness. It also gives your desserts a protein boost, which is certainly a plus. Additionally, one of the biggest benefits of tofu is that it has a mild and bland taste to begin with, meaning that it will take on the taste of the ingredients that it's combined with. The result? Your popsicles will taste purely like creamy chocolate and nothing like tofu.

If you like this idea, you'll be happy to find that most popular recipes online require just three ingredients, commonly silken tofu, chocolate chips, and vanilla almond milk (which keeps things vegan, so long as you also use vegan chocolate).

While vanilla almond milk adds a bit of extra flavor and smoothness to these ice pops, you don't necessarily need it. Just like with our recipe for two-ingredient chocolate pudding, you can make these popsicles with just chocolate and tofu. Just blend together the two ingredients in a food processor, then add the mixture to popsicle molds to turn them into a frozen treat. Freeze until the popsicles completely set, which will probably take at least two to three hours. If you make these popsicles in the morning, then they will definitely be frozen by the time you want an after-dinner sweet treat.

You can use any chocolate for this recipe — milk, dark, or white — so choose whichever one is your favorite. However, for the tofu, make sure that you choose silken kind only, as firm or extra firm "block" tofu does not have the right texture to result in the creamy consistency that we're looking for. Silken tofu is much softer and smoother, which allows it to blend easily into a creamy consistency. And once you try the most basic version of these pops, you can have endless fun customizing your next batch.

There are a few ways to customize these tofu-chocolate popsicles to make them even more exciting and delicious. For example, maybe you want to find a way to make the treats even more chocolatey. In this case, after the popsicles have set and you take them out of the mold, lay them out on a parchment paper-lined baking sheet, then drizzle melted chocolate over the top. Or, you could even dip them into more melted chocolate for a crisp shell. This is the perfect way to mix and match chocolate types — maybe you start with milk chocolate to combine with the tofu, then you use dark chocolate for the outer layer.

Another idea is to give these popsicles a fruity infusion. To do this, you can blend a banana or other fruits right into the base mixture, or chop up your choice of fruit — such as strawberries or blueberries — and fold them into the tofu-chocolate mix before pouring it into the popsicle molds and freezing. This would also work with chopped-up nuts, if you prefer a nutty infusion to a fruity one. Or, maybe you want to add both nuts and fruit for the ultimate creamy and cold dessert with bursts of sweet-tart flavor and crunchy texture.