I was trolling the dollar store for things to freeze into ice cubes, as I do, and found these large fluorescent ants.
I froze them into ice cubes using my Clearly Frozen tray. Then I shined a blacklight on them. They look awesome, even better in a glass with a drink.
There is a video of that here on my YouTube channel.
For more fun tips, check out The Ice Book.
Here’s a fun excerpt:
The American Mercury 1924-09: Vol 3 Iss 9
CLINICAL NOTES
BY GEORGE JEAN NATHAN AND H. L. MENCKEN
The cocktail, once observed George Ade, follows the American flag. That was twenty years ago. The flags of all nations today follow the cocktail. Its fame has spread over the globe, and justly. It has captured the English and the French, the Danes and the Italians. Five o'clock in Piccadilly brings its gin and vermouth and dash of bitters as five o'clock along the grand boulevards brings its iced brandy and gum syrup and dash of Byrth. It is the gift of smiling America to lackadaisical Europe. It is the international alcoholic Esperanto.
First there was nonalcoholic alcoholic seltzer.
To help drinkers in their sober curious exploration, White Claw is introducing a new way of drinking. Introducing White Claw 0% Alcohol – a new, non-alcoholic premium seltzer boasting the complex taste and feel of a real drink. Made from ultra-refined seltzer and blended with iconic flavors and hydrating electrolytes, White Claw 0% Alcohol is a new way to drink.
And now have nonalcoholic alcoholic sparkling iced tea!
Today, Loverboy announced their first-ever non-alcoholic take on the brand’s top-rated sparkling hard teas: Non-Alcoholic White Tea Peach and Non-Alcoholic Lemon Iced Tea.
Perfect for dry January, mocktail, and healthier resolutions stories, Loverboy is bringing the taste without the buzz to redefine how you imbibe – boasting full flavor, zero sugar, and only 10 calories per can.
Now, my math is a little rusty, but I think it goes something like:
I'm a total sucker for Halloween, and my only artistic medium is ice, so every year I do a post or two or three with dumb stuff I've frozen into cubes, blocks, etc. Here is a round-up and gallery of some:
Or read about how to do all this stuff in The Ice Book!
Nobody gave me a huge diamond chain for the holidays this year, so I had to make my own.
I used the typical cooler method for directional freezing, and
I made some fun ice, as I tend to do.
For the grid ice, I first made ice using the Ghost Ice tray, then I just set it on a cookie drying rack that I heated up on the stove burner. I think it looks like the tardis from Dr. Who.
For these cubes, I used the Dexas trays (purchase links here). For the cherry, I used a binder clip and clipped the stem sticking out of the top hole in the tray.
The blueberries – some floated and some sunk, so it turned out great with no effort.
I made striped ice cubes.
The first time I made striped ice was just before I figured out directional freezing to make clear ice. Having realized that the cloudiness in ice was caused by trapped air and not minerals, I tried to pour very thin layers of water in a tray so that the air might fizz off when the layer froze. It did not work, but it did make cool stripey ice.
So just for fun I decided to make some striped ice cubes. Using the Dexas IceOlogy tray (my recommendations for ice tools are all here) I filled the water up to the bottom of the tray, let it freeze, then added another layer, let it freeze, then repeated this a couple more times. You should be able to accomplish this more or less with a conventional ice cube tray.
So each layer is a clear part and a cloudy part. I still like the taste of clear ice better, but these cubes are fun. There are three cubes in the glass.
The index of ice experiment on Alcademics is here.
This isn't the first year I decided to freeze some goofy stuff in ice for Halloween. Remember that all the years of ice experiments can be found at the Index of Ice Experiments page.
Some previous years I've done:
This year I went back to ye olde drugstore and bought more stuff I thought would freeze well. I ended up with some skeleton hands, a vampire bat skeleton, and some little finger puppets.
Next up, a bat skeleton. This I just placed across the top of the cooler – it fit snugly into place.
And finally, I made ice with these skeleton hands frozen in it – a single hand in a plastic box inside the cooler, and two hands just resting in the block.
Many people have an extreme dislike of the word "mocktail," and a thousand and one Facebook discussions later, I've decided to put all the suggested alternatives for the word in one place.
So if you're looking for a new section heading for your bar menu, or you're a journalist writing the 4000th Dry January story and need some new words to use, this list is for you!
Please let me know if I missed something!
Got other ideas? Let me know!
I made more fun ice for Halloween. Recently I put some bouncy eyeballs into ice balls and froze a Halloween mask into an ice block.
This time I put some big glass eyes into ice balls and put vampire fangs into other ice balls. The glass eyes were an idea from bartender Ramon Pinon – they are available on Amazon at this link. I got these super large ones that fit into the ice ball mold that I use atop the Thermos Funtainer similarly to how I made these bugs and spider ice balls last year.
For the vampire fangs, I found colored ones at CVS and put them into the IceOlogy ice ball trays. The trick here is to put them in sideways so that air pockets don't form underneath them.
Anyway, good times, enjoy.
