Avocado Chocolate Pudding Popsicles

This smooth avocado chocolate pudding is made with avocados, cherries, and some brewed decaf coffee, but all you taste is the rich cocoa and melted dark chocolate. Make it into popsicles, or enjoy it by the spoonful! 

How is this chocolate avocado pudding popsicle recipe different?

This recipe for avocado chocolate pudding is similar to a few others here on the blog. The pudding is amazingly smooth and not-too-sweet.

As pops, there is so much good, rich stuff in there that they don't freeze super hard even when they're solid. You can lick the popsicle, or even have a bite without a shudder!

Eaten by the spoonful, this recipe is most similar to our healthy chocolate chia pudding. Like that pudding, this one is ready to eat the moment it's blended, although it will thicken a bit more once it's chilled. But instead of chia and coconut flour as thickeners, this recipe relies mostly upon avocados. 

Eaten as frozen popsicles, this recipe is most similar to our healthy fudgesicles. That recipe relies mostly upon melted chocolate and coconut cream for thickness. And it can't be eaten as a pudding. It's a thin pour into your popsicle mold, not the thick spooning you do in this recipe.

Finally, if you're looking for a mousse-like experience, try this recipe for Paleo chocolate mousse. It's mostly thickened with coconut cream. I've never tried freezing it in a popsicle mold, but I bet it would be dreamy.

To make this recipe, you really just need to throw all of the ingredients in a blender and let it do its thing. You do not need a high-speed blender to do the trick.

I generally use my Nutri-Bullet but used a bigger Dash blender for the video since it's easier to see what's going on as it blends. The mixture will be very thick, but soft. Just spoon it into lidded containers or into a popsicle mold and you're done.

Tips and tricks for keeping avocados fresh

Does your family eat a lot of avocados? I'm about as far away from California as you can get and still be in the U.S., so they're expensive where I live. I dream of having an avocado tree in my backyard. ?

When my gluten free son was still a baby and was first healing from previously undiagnosed celiac disease, avocados were one of the few foods he always seemed to love and be able to tolerate well. And he's always loved eating them, thankfully, even now that he's a teenager.

Full of healthy fats and with a beautiful texture that can even mimic butter when you need it to (like in our avocado brownies), they're one of my very favorite fruits for so many reasons.  But if you've ever shelled out cash for an avocado, you know how disappointing it is when they don't stay fresh until you're ready to eat them.

But that almost never happens to me anymore. Here's why.

Buy your avocados rock hard

First, I never buy an avocado that seems truly perfectly ripe and ready to eat immediately. I rarely take the time to truly inspect fruit in the grocery store, and it's easy to miss a bruised or overripe spot when shopping. 

If you buy unripe avocados, a quick spin in your hand, and you'll know right away if it's anything less than perfect. 

Ripen avocados on the counter, and then refrigerate them

Second, leave your avocados uncovered and loose on the kitchen counter and allow them to ripen naturally. If you pile them in a bowl, they'll bruise one another as they ripen. Plus, you'll probably miss one at the peak of ripeness.

Give them a light feel once a day or every other day, and the moment they're ripe, either eat and enjoy them or place them, loose, on a shelf in the refrigerator. They'll keep at the perfect stage of ripeness that way for at least a week.

After a few days in the refrigerator, when you peel a ripe avocado, you may find that the color of the pit has transferred to the flesh a bit. Your avocado may not be photo-ready (look closely at the avocados in the recipe video in this post, and you'll see what I mean!), but it will still taste just right.

Chocolate avocado popsicles: Substitution information

Dairy free chocolate avocado pudding popsicles

This recipe is nearly dairy-free (assuming your dark chocolate is dairy free; if not, choose a dairy free one if necessary). The splash of cream added to the brewed decaffeinated coffee is the only dairy-containing ingredient.

You can easily replace that heavy cream with coconut cream, or even your favorite unsweetened nondairy milk. The cream adds a bit of richness to the pudding (pops), but it's not essential. You could even just use a full 1/2 cup brewed decaffeinated brewed coffee. 

Can you replace the coffee and the cherries in this chocolate pudding?

Any time you're making anything with chocolate, adding some brewed coffee to the recipe can help deepen the chocolate flavor. The same is often true of cherries, like in my friend Mel's chocolate smoothie recipe that we've made so many times I know by heart.

The coffee and cherries in this recipe are particularly important since we don't want our avocado chocolate pudding to taste, well, like avocados. Even if you love the taste of avocados, you don't really want your chocolate pudding to taste like them.

Here, we're using avocados for their texture and health benefits. Not for their taste. 

Avoiding honey in these chocolate avocado pudding pops

If you'd like to make this recipe vegan, follow the instructions above for making it dairy-free, and use maple syrup instead of honey. Keep in mind, though, that maple syrup is generally less sweet and will add a bit of tang to the pudding and pops.

If you're eating this as pudding, the tangy flavor will be more pronounced, but the pudding will still taste pretty sweet. If you're making frozen popsicles, you'll want to add more sweetener since frozen foods generally taste less sweet.