Ice Cubes with Flowers – The Most Beautiful Way to Chill Your Drinks

You can freeze any flowers into ice, but if you’re going to be supping on a drink with them, you need to use edible flowers only.

Flowers of the edible variety can provide a welcome touch of pepper, mild, sweet, and floral flavours to whatever drink you grace them with.

 

Some of the flowers you need are of the florist kind (rose varieties, namely), but the wild ones that you can collect from fields and gently wash at home in the sink will be your finest additions. A few favourites:

• Pansies taste like lettuce, very mild (but pleasant) vegetal notes with a very slight sweetness, imparting minimal flavour into your drinks.

• Violas, a much more flavoursome choice, even though they’re smaller, slightly more floral than pansies and sweeter, too

• Cornflowers, oddly cucumber-ish with a bitter aftertaste with the stem, are best with flavoured gins and similar floral spirits.

• Alliums, onions all round here, with little appeal for ice cubes, although they do work with Pimm’s.

• Calendulas, a halfway house between rocket and watercress here, a hint of saffron and spice, perfect for rum cocktails.

Okay, so you can use roses in ice cubes, although it’s going to be the petals since the heads are way, way too large for any standard ice cube.

Red and pink roses are sublime offerings if you can use pure water that freezes crystal clear, because the ice cube acts as a slight magnifying glass that makes those petals pop.

White roses are lost in ice, but yellow ones certainly aren’t, with those bright-as-can-be petals providing a cracking base for Negroni and daiquiris, or even a mojito (with a twist of strawberry), giving top-tier sunset vibes.

You almost certainly don’t want to crush your flowers into water and hope for the best, since they will leach their colours and make the water impure.

Crystal clear ice is what we want, so collect:

• Bottled mineral water or tap water 
• Ice cube trays to size (silicon ones are best)

The key here is pure water and trays that match the size you need, which in some part is going to be dictated by the types of flowers you are using.

You can place tiny flowers like violas into the smallest ice cubes to provide a fantastic glacier effect in a small tumbler, but you can’t do the same with roses or anything else that you need to cut down to size, such as a calendula.

What glasses are you going to use, and what cocktails you’re going to make, will help you pick the best setup for your flower ice cubes.

With your kit sorted, follow these steps.

1. Half-fill the tray with mineral water or tap water.
2. Lower your flowers or petals into water with a gentle push.
3. Add more water to the trays, so the flowers are submerged and the water gently bubbles over the top.
4. Place a flat sheet on top of the trays, such as a plastic cutting board, so the flowers don’t work their way loose during freezing.
5. Place the ice cube tray into your freezer, flat.
6. Wait three to four hours, and do not disturb your ice cubes before.

Props if you’re using a silicon ice cube tray because you can easily stretch and tug your ice cubes free from their homes. 

Plastic trays are a fuss sometimes, but if you turn them upside down and whack them against a countertop (gently), those cubes should give up.

That mineral water you used should be clear with no impurities, so you should see those flowers in all their glory. A cloudy mix is normal with some cubes, so don’t be disheartened if you lose around half of them.

A resealable plastic bag is as good a place as any to store your ice cubes in the freezer. We don’t leave our ice cubes in the trays because if the top part of the cube is relentlessly exposed to cold, dry air from the freezer, it clouds over.

When you want to add a cube, or two, or half a dozen, to your drink, then all you need to do is plop it in a glass, and you’re golden.

It’s an oddity seeing flowers in ice cubes for the first time, but there’s honestly no prettier way to decorate your summer drinks.

Yellow in something red, purple in something clear, and pink in a fizzy yellow number are delightful treats you and your guests can enjoy anytime, and those flowers might even provide depth of flavour for a whole new world of lush.

Don’t forget your flat surfaces, either, with Euroflorist’s summer flower bouquets providing a welcome touch of colour to your interiors.