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For a long time, I didn’t know what passion fruit tasted like. I associated it vaguely with tropical juice blends and  artificial fragrances in things like air fresheners and girly shampoos.

For some reason, I assumed it was syrupy sweet and generally unappealing.

Man was I wrong.

Real passion fruit is tart and fragrant, almost lemony, but somehow fuller and rounder, hitting more complex notes.

There’s a reason it’s a perennial favorite of pastry chefs.

Its potent acidity makes it a great ingredient for balancing sweeter ingredients.

It plays beautifully with things like white chocolate and caramel that can be tooth achingly sweet on their own.

It’s become one of my favorite flavors to play around with.

Especially when I discovered that I could buy high quality frozen puree on the cheap at my neighborhood Latin grocery store. It’s a shortcut that means I don’t have to track down fresh passion fruit and pulp them to get that intoxicating flavor.

But if you have access to fresh passion fruit you absolutely can use them here. Just cut open the fruit and scoop out the juicy pulp and strain out the seeds. (The seeds are edible, but their texture would be wrong for these popsicles.)

When I saw a recipe for passion fruit-pineapple sorbet in Claudia Fleming’s excellent (and distressingly out-of-print) dessert cookbook The Last Course, I knew that the flavor combination would be a winner.

I love pineapple, but it can cross the line to too sweet pretty easily. Passion fruit’s tartness works here to keep that sweetness in check, while the pineapple rounds out passion fruit’s pucker.

It’s an excellent combination.

And it works beautifully in these passion fruit-pineapple popsicles.

I started with a whole pineapple, but there’s no reason you couldn’t start with one that has already been peeled and cored if you don’t want to bother with that part yourself.

The pineapple gets tossed with sugar and zizzed into a pale yellow froth in a food processor.

And then it gets mixed with the passion fruit puree and then the mixture gets poured into popsicle molds and tucked into the freezer until pops are frozen solid.

These are some of the best popsicles I’ve made.

They are so tropical and bright and refreshing. (A bit like these mango lime popsicles, which are also wonderful summer treats.)

I’m sure I’ll be returning to this flavor combination again.

But for now, I’ll just have another popsicle.