Tag: directional freezing

Make Clear Stars and Hearts Ice with Silicone Cupcake Liners

You can make clear ice cubes in a tray in a cooler by punching holes in the bottom of each cube compartment and setting the tray on a riser. This is described here. Most commercial clear ice cube trays work similarly.

But cubes are not the only shape of clear ice you can make in this method. Using these cheap silicone cupcake liners from Amazon:

I poke holes in them (using this hole punch) and set them on a riser in a cooler. I then filled the cooler with water up to the level of the top of the cupcake liners. I let them freeze for 24 hours, though I could have pulled them out sooner.

The silicone cupcake liners pulled out of the ice surprisingly easily, and the ice slipped right out.

They were hard to photograph with liquid in the glass, because they're so clear the ice disappeared. For the ones with liquid in them, I only have a little bit of liquid in the glass.

I'd love to think of a way to best display them in cocktails. Perhaps tucked into crushed ice at the surface of a drink. Of course they'd also look great with colored ice, but then we wouldn't have had to poke holes in the cupcake liners in the first place!

January 16, 2023
Edible Flowers Frozen in Incredibly Clear Ice Balls

I'm on a mission to freeze everything I can get my hands on into crystal clear ice balls.

To make them clear, I'm using a thermos and ice ball mold – you can read about the method to make clear ice spheres on this post.

In the past, I've made plain clear spheres, spheres with a spiralized lime, and a whole bunch of other lime slices and wedges. It's been fun.

You can see all of the many ice experiments at Alcademics here at the Index of Ice Experiments.

I also bought a bunch of edible flowers and toyed with those. Note that if you're going to reproduce these at home, it's really important to use edible flowers, not regular flowers that may have been coated with pesticides and such.

I started with edible orchids:

I also tried other flowers:

Once again you can read about how to do that here.

And for more pics of my ongoing ice experiments, check out my Instagram page.

You can see all of the many ice experiments at Alcademics here at the Index of Ice Experiments.

May 9, 2017
Fun with Limes Inside Clear Ice Balls

Using this method of directional freezing (developed here on Alcademics) with thermos containers and ice ball molds to maximize the clarity of ice balls, I have been playing around with putting objects inside ice spheres.

I first did a spiralized lime that you can see here – it came out pretty awesomely.

Then the other day I made some lime wedges and lime slices and put them in my ice ball molds.

When you freeze limes, it squeezes out some of the juice so the ice ball isn't crystal-clear as it is using this method with solid objects, but it still looks great and inside a cocktail you'd probably not notice.

To keep up on my ongoing icesperiments, follow along on my Instagram page.

April 6, 2017