After being introduced to them at Drink in Boston, we’ve come to learn that ice cones are a staple of a lot of tiki drinks – in particular, grogs. Aside from looking the part, ice cones do a great job of keeping your drink nice and cold without the potential of melting quickly like you might run into with crushed ice. They do tend to be a bit time consuming, but the end result is really worth the elbow grease. We tried out a couple different methods to create our own (good information on ice cones online is difficult to come by), and after our experiments, here’s where we ended up!
Materials you’ll need:
a) The Vessel. You need something conical to pack the ice into in order to make your ice cone. I’ve heard pilsner glasses suggested, but frankly they tend to be too large for almost all of our glassware. You should shape your cones to best suit what you’re going to be drinking out of, because if you can’t effectively use it, what’s the point? We found something somewhere between an Irish Coffee glass and a Champagne Trumpet flute at our local secondhand store. The glass you use is up to you, but what we found the most versatile was around 6″ tall and no more than 3″ across at the bottom.
b) The Stick. You need something longer than the cone that is a uniform thickness and at least as large as a straw. We used chopsticks for ours.
c) The Crusher. Before you can pack your ice cone, you will need to shave a whole bunch of ice. For our glass, we needed about 8 ice cubes worth of shaved ice. Blenders don’t work very well if you don’t have an expensive, fancy blender created specifically for crushing ice.
d) The Spritzer. A clean spray bottle filled with clean, drinkable water.
More after the break!
The Process:
Once you get started, you’ll have to work rather quickly to keep the ice from melting, so I suggest you have all your tools laid out and ready to go before you start.
1) Crush the Ice. We don’t have an especially nice or powerful blender or food processor, so we opted to use our hand crusher first to break the cubes into smaller chunks before putting them into our food processor. ENtire ice cubes tended to bounce around and get rounded off, rather than be shaved nicely. Any large chunks in your ice will greatly increase the likelihood of the cone breaking before you can use it. After crushing the ice and putting it in the food processor, pound the hell out of it until it’s light and fluffy like snow. Any large chunks aren’t going to be useful.
2) Pack the Vessel. Scoop out your shaved ice one spoonful at a time, and tamp it down with your fingers. You want it to be packed nice and tightly, and if you wait to pack it down until the glass is full, the shape of the glass will prevent the tip from being compressed, and it will break off when you take it out of the glass. Once the glass is packed all the way in and you have a pretty flat surface at the top of your glass, you’re ready to move on.
3) Drill the Hole. This one can take a little practice to get right. You will need to force the stick down through the center of the glass and have it come out at the tip of the cone, being careful not to insert it crookedly and have it poke out the side. Once you are happy with this part, get a plate ready for the next step, which can be a little tricky.
4) Remove the Cone. After a whole bunch of trials where we re-froze the glass and tried to remove the cone with varying degrees of success, we figured out that the cones will survive intact every time if you remove them before freezing. Slowly turn the vessel over, holding it in place so it doesn’t fall out. Over the plate, allow the cone to gently fall out of the glass while pushing the stick in further. Place the cone, flat-side down, on the plate and pull the stick out of the narrow end completely. Set the stick aside.
5) Mist the Cone. Finally, give the cone a few quick spritzes with the spray bottle evenly on all sides. This will coat the cone in a thin layer of water that will freeze quickly and strengthen the cone. Place the cone–on it’s plate–in the freezer and leave it alone for an hour or so.
6) Use the Cone. Just slide a straw through the hole you’ve made, and you’re ready to drink! The cone will keep for a few days before it starts to lose moisture and the gaps between the ice shavings will grow, and the whole thing will start to take on a feint freezer-burn smell.
So that’s it! Hopefully our experimenting will help you skip right to the tiki drinks with as little difficulty as possible. If you’ve got any questions at all about the process, leave them in the comments and I’ll try my best to answer them. And just in case you’ve got an ice cone and nothing to stick it in, here’s the recipe for the Navy Grog from Beach Bum Berry Remixed that we made for ours:
Navy Grog
1 oz Jamaican Rum
1 oz El Dorado Rum
1 oz Puerto Rican Rum
1 oz honey syrup
0.75 oz lime juice
0.75 oz white grapefruit juice
0.75 oz soda water
Shake well with ice, strain into a rocks glass with an ice cone.
