Good Eats at the TEOTWAWKI Café—Snow Cone Syrup (plus a medicinal use)

Last week, following a pretty good snowfall, I finally got around to making snow ice cream.  It tasted much better than I thought it would and was rather easy to make.  While I wouldn’t serve it to company if I had other options for ice cream, I could serve the snow ice cream without embarrassment if I lacked other choices.  Unfortunately, freshly fallen snow works best for snow ice cream. 

What if it’s a few days later and the snow has melted and thawed a bit and crystallized into larger crystals?  Snow cones!  As I brought in the snow after dinner this evening, it seemed indeed very close in texture to the ice in the snow cones of my childhood.  (While it’s a frugal treat, snow cones aren’t the first dessert that comes to mind in the middle of winter.  However, there are handy little kitchen appliances for making shaved ice year round.  Most of the ones featured on Amazon appear to be electric, but there are a few manual ones that cost substantially less and have high reviews.  Every once in a while I see ice shavers like the Pampered Chef one I had years ago at thrift stores and garage sales.)

I searched the internet for snow cone syrup recipes.  They were all basically the same, just varying in the sugar to water ratio.  Naturally, the more sugar the better.  And not just because it’s sweeter that way—a thicker syrup won’t melt the ice as quickly.  All of the recipes called for at least 1 cup of sugar and a cup of water.  That’s a lot of syrup.  If you don’t need that much syrup, scale down the recipe.

Snow Cone Syrup

2 cups sugar

1 cup water

1 package unsweetened Kool-Aid powdered drink mix

Bring the sugar and water to a boil.  Stir in the Kool-Aid.  Cool.  Pour over snow.  (Plastic squeeze ketchup bottles are perfect for this.)

Notes.  You may also substitute 1 teaspoon LorAnn candy flavoring or 2 teaspoons of extract like orange or lemon.  If you wish to scale down the recipe, each packet of Kool-Aid contains just under 1 teaspoon of mix.  So you can easily use ½ cup sugar, ¼ cup water, and ¼ teaspoon of Kool-Aid powder to make a small batch. 

Family reviews:  I made small batches of three flavors—strawberry (Kool-Aid), black cherry (Kool-Aid), and watermelon (LorAnn candy flavoring).  Blueberry Girl, Ellie, and Aaron were the additional taste-testers tonight.  Each of them had a different favorite.  (If you really need a tie-breaker for this, I favored the strawberry.)  The Kool-Aid packets produce a much more vivid color than the LorAnn flavoring.  And they are a lot cheaper, though at 50 cents each, they’re a lot more expensive than they used to be!  I was hoping Amazon would have some better prices, but no such luck there, unless you’re buying enough to supply a small country. 

I also had the idea that perhaps Jell-O gelatin could be used to make a snow cone syrup, so I mixed some up.  No such luck.  You need to cut back on the water to make it sweet enough, but when you do that, it gels too much to pour.  It was worth a try.

Now for the medicinal application. 

In December 2022 I posted a couple of articles on using LorAnn candy flavorings to DIY medicinal syrups for children.  Those candy flavorings were the best suggestion I had for covering up the nasty taste of children’s antibiotics, until now.  The LorAnn flavorings are good, but they are also rather expensive.  But Kool-Aid?  Even at 50 cents a packet, it’s still pretty cheap.  And it’s easier to measure than the LorAnn flavorings.  And the syrup is really good, too.  I was dipping my finger in and licking it all the way to the sink.  Kinda shameless for a 50+ year-old woman to do that.  Where’s my self-respect?!  It was Kool-Aid, for heaven’s sake.

Links to related posts:

Candy Flavorings to Add to the Medicine Chest

Snow Ice Cream 

What to Share with Parents Panicking over Pediatric Drug Shortages