Create Your Own Fruit Flavored Homemade Sodas

Let me say, while I'm not the kind of parent who bans soda, I do limit it for my children and myself. Like a lot of families I know, we save it for 'special occasions', which translates to about once a week. Sometimes though...nothing tastes better than a nice cold Coke, am I right? 

Still, I don't want my kids to feel as if they're slaves to their cravings or that they don't have options. So while I was wheeling through the grocery store I decided to grab a few blood oranges, a couple limes, a bottle of seltzer water, and sugar. Yep, that's all you need to make your own soda! 

PLUS, this is a great recipe to make WITH the kids! 

Keep reading to find out how to create your own sodas. 

First thing you'll need to make is a simple syrup. We mixed 4 cups of water with 2 cups of sugar over heat until the sugar had dissolved into the water. 

I'd always been told a classic simple syrup was 1:1 ratio, one part sugar to one part water. 

However, it turns out you can use, pretty much, whatever ratio you want. While our drinks were exactly how I wanted them, they weren't as sweet as typical sodas. If you WANT that extra sweetness I'd recommend the 1:1 ratio. 

While we sat the syrup aside to cool we juiced our fruit. I want to pause right here and say no matter how menial something may seem it can become a learning experience if you let it!

We talked about looking at the rind to figure out how hard you'd have to work to get the juice out, feeling the fruit to see if it needed to be rolled and softened ahead of time, and how chilling the fruit effected how much juice you could get from it. 

In all we ended up with roughly a cup of fruit juice. 

Now is when I lost track of measurements, sorry. We poured the simple syrup into two bottles of equal size; then we added the blood orange juice to one bottle and the lime juice to the other. 

P.S. These bottles were from an older project I'd worked on using glass paints. 

Of course the kids got to label their creations! 

I know what you're thinking...this is syrup, where's the soda?

To make sodas, I'd recommend a 2:1 ratio between the seltzer water and the flavored syrup.

That was sweet enough for me, but I'm pretty sure the kids gave their drinks an extra swig of syrup when I turned my head. 

How do you create healthy options for your family? 

Tell me in the comments below!