Author Spotlight
Isabel Baldassaro
During my two-hours of daily TikTok time, I always seem to run across some sort of fridge-stocking video filled with fun-shaped or flavored ice cubes. Whether it’s butterfly fruit cubes or hundreds of coffee-flavored spheres, I’ve been inspired to craft my own cubes.
So, I bought a $15 pack of six different molds from Amazon that offered over 10 different shapes — stars, roses, hearts and other flowers like tulips and daisies. I then made a few different flavors of ice cubes using four of the molds. Here is my ranking of the three:
A fresh jug of cranberry apple juice in my garage fridge was perfect to create a refreshing, crimson red hue for ice in the heart mold.
Once I poured the juice into the mold, I set it on a plate in the freezer, and it took less than an hour to freeze. While I assumed the flimsy material would make the hearts hard to de-mold, they turned out exactly how I wanted. Each one-inch bite-sized cube tasted just like a frozen fruit popsicle on a hot summer’s day. While I did enjoy a cup of juice with the heart ice to keep it cooled, I enjoyed snacking on them alone better than in my drink.
They were a delicious treat that was easy to make, and the cute mini-heart shapes made them even more fun to eat. After finishing all 15 of them in one day, I have claimed them my favorite and will definitely be remaking them soon.
I’ve always loved flavored water like cucumber mint or sparkling strawberry water, but I’ve never tried frozen fruit in water. But after seeing multiple ice cubes filled with frozen raspberries and strawberries, I had to try it. I poured normal water into the 15 flower-shaped molds and added just two small pieces of raspberries or blueberries in each cube. They were harder to assemble, having to add the perfect amount of water so that it didn’t overflow when I put the fruit in each mold. I put them in my water bottle the next morning for school.
I expected more of a fruity pop of flavor in the water but it turned out to be a light, sweet taste that added a refreshing hint to my water. Even as I refilled my bottle throughout the day, the flavor remained vibrant and the ice cubes stayed frozen long enough to last me through the school day.
I ranked this number two because while the cubes brought that fresh taste to my water, they were harder to make, and weren’t as sweet and delectable as the cran-apple hearts, leaving the raspberry flavor tasting old and stale by the end of the day.
I’ll be keeping a mold full of these cubes in my fridge ready if I ever want a refreshing boost to my water.
One of the most common ice cube flavors I see on “Freezer TikTok” is coffee. Though iced coffee is my favorite choice of beverage, these cubes weren’t my favorite.
After brewing a fresh cup of coffee, I poured it equally into the 15 molds, and let it freeze overnight. The next morning, I added them to a little warm coffee but mostly creamer so that the ice cubes would add more coffee to the drink when it melted. But even after I put 12 cubes in my coffee, there wasn’t really a difference. My drink wasn’t really chilled, and I couldn’t taste the coffee that had supposedly come from the cubes.
I feel like it’s almost worth it to just use normal ice cubes if you want to chill your drink because they could at least keep the drink cold. The ice cubes might’ve had a cute shape, but they were too small to actually cool down my drink. Maybe if I hadn’t put them in warm coffee they would’ve worked better and added more of a prominent taste to my drink.
I did think the star shape made for a cute look and enjoyed how easily they came out of the molds though, and will be using the molds for other frozen concoctions in the future.
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