Over on my Instagram account, I posted a lot of pictures of goofy ice projects for Halloween. I realized I should also share them here on the blog for posterity. This is one of several posts.
I bought this plastic severed hand at the Halloween store. To get the fingers to freeze in side the ice block, I raised the handle on the cooler and held the hand in place using tape. The hand floats otherwise.
Over on my Instagram account, I posted a lot of pictures of goofy ice projects for Halloween. I realized I should also share them here on the blog for posterity. This is one of several posts.
This is a plastic skull I bought at the Halloween store and froze in an ice block in my cooler. It looked pretty amazing as it melted.
I covered it on my Instagram account, but I made some simple cranberry ice cubes.
For the spheres, I simply added cranberries to clear ice molds. [list of recommended products here]
For the spears/sheets, I floated some cranberries in a cooler and let it freeze for about a day. I then broke up the slab into spears. These look cool but the cranberries don't stay stuck into the ice for very long.
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 bought some collins-sized ice cube trays (these ones) and decided to make an ice spear version of Jenga. I mean, why not?
I didn't expect it would actually work. I mean, it didn't work all that well but I was able to get three out! Probably the second two on the bottom only came out because those ones had melted the most, but I'll take it.
Here are some pictures. Your mileage may vary.
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.
VinePair writer Tim McKirdy wrote a story on How to Create Perfectly Clear Ice, so naturally he included Directional Freezing, and the method I created way back in 2009 using a picnic cooler.
This is just a quick post to link to it so that I don't forget. Check it out here.
Men's Journal did a story on directional freezing highlighting my cooler method of 11 years ago. Spoiler: It still works.
I was interviewed for a story on ice that appeared in the Wall Street Journal this week.
Here's the story link if you have subscriber access.
The intro part that mentions me is below.
A few years back. a couple different ice adventurers figured out that you can use a silicone ice cube tray to make clear cubes in a directional freezing system (an insulated cooler in a freezer) simply by poking holes in the bottom of the tray, setting the tray on a small riser (to give a place for the cloudy water to get pushed down through), and filling the cooler only to the level of the top of the silicone tray.
When frozen, you can pry out the tray from the block and your cubes are shaped like cubes. Here's the first post where the process was shown.
More recently, Shawn Soole of Soole Hospitality and the Post Shift Podcast messaged me to suggest: If you can do it with one layer of trays, can you put another tray underneath it, also with holes and get two sets of cubes at once?
Great question!
I decided to try it and the answer is yes. However, as you'll see by scrolling through the pictures, the first tray is easy to ply off the frozen block. The second one: Not So Much. I was able to chip it out using an ice pick though. It took a while but not forever.
My conclusion about this is: Yes it works!
But is is practical? I think it would be if you had ice cube trays nearly the size of the whole cooler. Otherwise you're doing what I did, which is chipping off most of the cooler-sized block just to get two trays worth of cubes. It would be more efficient if I put in these two trays side by side so I only had to freeze a few inches of the block.
Someone please make an ice cube tray that's exactly cooler size, please!
I be you could do it with the Ghost Ice system, but you'd have to cut up a second tray (and those suckers ain't cheap) to place beneath the top tray, and leave it in the freezer twice as long. That might be efficient in some systems where you need to leave the tray in the freezer over the weekend, but probably for most people it would be simpler to just do one layer at a time.
So I'm going with: Theory proven. Reality? Not so efficient.
Steps:
And remember to check out the full list of Ice Experiments on Alcademics for tons of awesome ice projects.
