Do you want to impress your guests with something original? Why not serve ice cubes that contain edible flowers from your own garden? It’s so easy to do!
Step by Step
- Fill an ice cube tray with water to about one third of its height.
- Place in the freezer.
- Harvest edible flowers* from your garden (borage, calendula, carnation, cornflower, marigold, nasturtium, pelargonium, rose [or rose petals], pansy, snapdragon, sweet woodruff, viola, violet, etc.), removing their peduncle (stem) as you do so.
*Avoid using flowers that have been recently sprayed with pesticides.
- When the ice has started to take (after about an hour), place one or more flowers in each cavity.
Borage flowers starting to freeze. Photo: oelegarten.com - Gently fill the tray with water so as not to disturb the flowers.
- Put it back into the freezer.
- After about 24 hours, remove the now fully frozen floral ice cubes from the tray.
- Seal them in plastic bags and store them in the freezer until you need them.
Clearer Cubes
Tap water or bottled water will give ice cubes that are a bit cloudy, an effect caused by the presence of small air bubbles. This is not, in itself, a problem, because the flowers will still be visible. They’ll just appear “artistically blurry.”
If you prefer nearly transparent ice cubes, though, boil the water in a kettle, let it cool and boil it a second time, then let it cool again. That will remove the better part of the air. Now, when you freeze the boiled water, there will be almost no air bubbles and this will give your ice cubes a much more crystalline appearance.
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