Make a Splash With These 12 Creative Ice Cubes to Spruce Up Your Drink

You spend 10 minutes concocting the perfect artisanal cocktail (or summer mocktail), only to have your masterpiece thwarted when you pour it over clear and flavorless ice cubes. Don’t let boring ice ruin your drink! Spice it up by using summer ice cube recipes that will give your beverage extra flavor and beauty. From layered latte cubes for your espresso martini to floral ice cubes to chill your lemonade and even an OMG-worthy glitter DIY, these 12 creative ice cubes will spruce up even the dullest drink. Chill out and scroll down if you want to change your bartending game for life.

1. Smoothie Fruit Cubes: You probably never knew you needed smoothie ice cubes in your life until now. Luckily the possibilities are absolutely endless. You can pour chilled Champagne over the top for a fun take on mimosas or even save them for quick and easy baby food in a pinch. (via Oh, the Things We’ll Make)

2. Blueberry Ice Cubes: Sipping on sparkling water is much more appealing when there’s a magenta ice cube floating in it. Increase your drink’s refreshing factor with these blueberry cubes that add a hit of flavor along with their beautiful hue. (via Marla Meridith)

3. Coffee and Milk Ice Cubes: Your daily cold brew will never be the same. Why water down your joe with regular ice when you can use coffee and milk cubes to chill your drink? Say sayonara to your barista, because you’ll be brewing like the pros from now on. (via The Sassy Life)

4. Floral Ice Cubes: To make these feminine floral cubes, opt for chemical-free edible flowers like rose, lavender and elderflower. These would make a gorgeous cocktail addition for a spring or summer bridal shower. (via Nialogique)

5. Flavored Ice Cubes: We’ve all been there. You get overly excited about those plump seasonal berries and buy as many as you can, only to have them go bad before you can eat them. Before that happens, freeze them in an ice tray with some sugar and water for a colorful addition to any drink. (via Spoon Fork Bacon)

6. Glitter Ice Cubes: From this point forward, all of your parties need these sparkly ice cubes. Match the edible glitter with your party’s color theme and watch everyone be amazed at your glitzy creation. (via A Subtle Revelry)

7. Hibiscus Ice Cubes: Add instant flavor to your iced tea with these brisk and floral hibiscus ice cubes. Make a huge batch and chuck them into a punch bowl to step up an ordinary drink. (via Chestnut Herbs)

8. Melon Ball Ice Cubes: Ice cubes you can snack on when your drink is finished? Yes please! Nothing screams summer quite like melon, and these frozen balls of deliciousness will do double duty to cool you down in the hotter months. (via The Kitchn)

9. Mint Infused Ice Cubes: If you’ve never enjoyed mint in your lemonade, now’s the time to give it a try. These mint-infused ice cubes are perfect for adding a bit of zest to any beverage while keeping it nice and chilled. (via 17 Apart)

10. Pomegranate Ice Cubes: Pomegranate arils are the perfect size to freeze in an ice tray. Normally you would try to sip your drink before the ice melts, but in this case you may want to wait around for the pomegranate to saturate it with its flavor. (via By Stephanie Lynn)

11. Rainbow Ice Cubes: You can easily get stunning rainbow ice cubes without the use of artificial ingredients — even the vibrant blue color is made using butterfly pea tea. Whether you’re serving them to adults or kids, you’ll face many questions on how you accomplished such a crafty feat. (via The Flavor Blender)

12. Tequila Strawberry-Lime Ice: This ice may not even make it to your drink. Just pop one in your mouth and let the tequila-lime flavor melt to quench your thirst. If you don’t have an ice tray on hand, you can use a mini muffin tin. (via Half Baked Harvest)

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With sweet treat recipes that range from Yakult Leches Cake and Marbled Ube Banana Bread to Mochi-Stuffed Chocolate Chip Cookies and Pandan Coconut Cream Pie, recipe developer, content creator, and now-author Arlyn Osborne’s Sugarcane: Sweet Recipes from My Half-Filipino Kitchen is packed with a whole rainbow of magical Filipino desserts. The debut cookbook celebrates her Filipino heritage by fusing traditional dishes with Western methods widely used in the states, and wow, is it wonderful.

The 80 recipes in Sugarcane illustrate Arlyn’s earliest memories surrounding food, and some have even followed her since her middle school days. In fact, the book’s cover honors pandesal, the popular Philippine bread rolls that brought her closer to her family overseas than ever before (in her words: “It’s iconic. A national treasure.”).

Though you’d never guess it from the look of her colorful treats, Arlyn didn’t grow up cooking. As she describes it, going all-out for everyday meals wasn’t exactly her parents’ thing.

“Cooking was something that was mostly reserved for special occasions like holidays, birthdays, celebrations, that sort of thing,” she says. “It just wasn't worth the trouble to them. Most of our meals were just fast food or frozen Kids Cuisine dinners.”

Arlyn says her childhood was “dysfunctional,” and this detachment from food was just a small part of the picture. Despite an absence of physical affection and frequent “I love you”s at home, Arlyn let her undying love for Food Network and a strong sweet tooth sweep her away into the culinary world.

After years of working in food styling and production, writing about food, and developing recipes, Arlyn’s using her first cookbook to communicate her passion for cooking and baking, as well as carry on the legacy of Filipino food to ultimately find her place in it all.

“I think over the years, I have become sometimes a little uncomfortable to say some of the things I wish I could say out loud,” she says. “For me, food is the way for me to say those things without actually saying them.”

About The Recipes

Sugarcane: Sweet Recipes from My Half-Filipino Kitchen by Arlyn Osborne

Flipping through the recipes in Sugarcane, you may see a few ingredients that aren’t very common in Western cooking listed – like pandan, tamarind, ube, calamansi, star fruit, mochi, and rambutan – but there’s familiarity in each one of them.

Arlyn wrote Sugarcane for both people who are familiar with Filipino food, and those who are not. Either way, the recipes will guide you to greatness.

“I get that it can be a little intimidating for people to try out ingredients or desserts they've never heard of before, but I do think that people should know that if they're cooking from my cookbook, they’re going to be okay,” she says. “I think everyone’s going to feel that they're personified in each recipe a little bit.”

From The Book: Ube Coconut Cake

Arlyn’s Ube Coconut Cake recipe pulls inspiration from ube cake (the “crown jewel” when it comes to Filipino cake) and lucious coconut cakes from the American South. Ube halaya, which is essentially an ube jam, is the star of the coconut cake recipe, lending a gorgeous purple hue to the tender layers. Everything gets sandwiched in between and smothered in a sweet coconut icing *so* yummy, you’ll quickly see why Arlyn makes it every year for her birthday.

Ingredients for Ube Coconut Cake

Ube Cake

  • 3 cups (375 g) all-purpose flour
  • 1 tablespoon baking powder
  • 1 ½ teaspoons kosher salt
  • ¾ teaspoon baking soda
  • ¾ cup (186 g) ube halaya, at room temperature
  • 2 ¼ cups (450 g) granulated sugar
  • 6 large eggs, at room temperature
  • 1 tablespoon ube paste
  • 1 ½ cups (360 g) buttermilk
  • 1 ½ cups (315 g) neutral oil

Coconut Frosting

  • Two 16 oz. (454 g) containers sour cream
  • 4 cups (800g) granulated sugar
  • ¼ teaspoon kosher salt
  • 14 cups (700g) unsweetened shredded coconut

How to Make Ube Coconut Cake

For the Ube Cake

  1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F (180 degrees C). Grease two 9-inch round cake pans with cooking spray and line the bottoms with parchment paper.
  2. In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, salt, and baking soda.
  3. To the bowl of a stand mixer fitter with the whisk, add the ube halaya and beat until smooth. Add the sugar and beat on medium-high speed until combined but not creamed. The sugar should look moist, crumbly, and purple.
  4. Add the eggs and ube paste and beat on medium speed until combined, about 30 seconds. Add the buttermilk and oil and beat until combined, about 30 seconds.
  5. Sift in half of the flour mixture and whisk by hand until just combined. Repeat with the remaining flour mixture and whisk until just combined.
  6. Divide the batter evenly between the prepared cake pans. Bake until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cakes comes out clean, 35 to 40 minutes.
  7. Transfer the pans to a wire rack and let cool for 10 minutes. Run a small offset spatula around the perimeter to loosen the edges. Invert the cakes onto the wire rack. Remove the parchment and invert again onto wire racks so they sit right side up. Let cool completely.

For the Coconut Frosting

  1. To the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle, add the sour cream, sugar, and salt. Beat on low speed until combined. Add a third of the coconut and beat on low speed until combined. Repeat two more times.

To assemble

  1. Place one cake layer (top side up) on a cake plate. Top with 2 cups (450 g) of frosting and spread evenly. Top with the second cake layer (bottom side up).
  2. Cover the top evenly with 2 ½ (560 g) cups of frosting. Use the remaining frosting for the sides. Wrapt the cake all over with plastic wrap so it touches the frosting directly and protects the cake from air. Refrigerate overnight. As it sits, both the cake layers and coconut shreds will soak up excess moisture from the frosting.
  3. Let the cake sit out at room temperature for 1 hour to take the chill off before serving. Due to the nature of the frosting, it's best to use a serrated knife to “saw” through the cake into slices.

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Photography by Linda Xiao. Excerpted with permission from Sugarcane by: Arlyn Osborne published by ‎Hardie Grant Publishing, March 2024, RRP $35.00 Hardcover.

There are a few things that unite Emily Henry Girlies: we love romance, we love quirky details, and we love Taylor Swift. (And based on my Emily Henry interview, I can confirm that she does too!). The author herself describes her new book, titled Funny Story, as “the wind in my hair on the weekend,” a line from Taylor Swift's "Karma." Here's everything we know about the new Emily Henry book. Buckle up, because there's a *lot* about Funny Story we can’t wait to dive into.

Is Emily Henry making a Funny Story TV show?

Image via Emily Henry/Instagram

If you're already daydreaming about seeing Funny Story onscreen, you're not the only one — even Emily Henry herself is thinking about whether the book will turn into a TV show. She tells Variety she hopes to have details "really soon" about onscreen adaptations for her newest novel, as well as last year's Happy Place.

What is Funny Story about?

Image via Samson Katt/Pexels

In Funny Story, Daphne and her fiancé Peter are madly in love. They've moved back to his childhood hometown, where Peter constantly tells the story of how they met. All is well...until Peter realizes he's actually in love with his childhood best friend Petra. Now Daphne is stranded in Waning Bay, Michigan, and even though she has no friends or family, she does have her dream job as a children’s librarian, so at least that's one point in her favor.

Now, with barely any money, there's only one potential roommate who could possibly understand what she's going through: Petra’s ex, Miles. Despite the fact that Miles happens to be Daphne's polar opposite. After they form a friendship (which may or may not involve posting misleading images of their summer together), Daphne realizes that she might have done the craziest thing of all: fallen for her ex-fiancé’s new fiancée’s ex. No biggie.

Will Funny Story connect to the other Emily Henry books?

Images via Amazon

Based on her other stories, we're not expecting Funny Story to directly tie into Happy Place, Book Lovers, People We Meet On Vacation, or Beach Read. However, she does often reference the characters from her other stories once. So don't be surprised if Daphne bumps into Nora in the grocery store or finds one of Gus' books incorrectly shelved in the library.

When is the Funny Story release date?

Image via Devyn Glista St. Blanc Studios

Funny Story will be released on April 23, 2024, almost a year after Happy Place was released!

What does the cover look like?

The covers are always one of my favorite parts of any Emily Henry book. They're always vibrant, bold, and always show just enough of the characters to both catch your eye and keep you intrigued. In the past, they've been blue, pink, orange, and yellow, with bits of other colors interspersed in the details.

After hoping for a green, deep red-orange, or lilac color (and after Emily Henry's official Instagram announcementmade me think we'd get purple), the author showed off the brand new cover for Funny Story! The vibrant deep mix between purple and blue is the perfect color against Daphne, Miles, and all of their accessories.

We already have a feel for the characters, too! Daphne's sassy head tilt, the "we're in this together" energy, the fact that Miles is wearing crocs.

Where can I preorder Funny Story?

Image via Emily Henry/Instagram

There are a number of you can preorder Funny Story! Here are a few:

Are you excited for Emily Henry's Funny Story? Let us know in the comments!

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Lead image viaEmily Henry/Instagram

When anyone asks me for my favorite movie-viewing experiences, A Simple Favor (starring Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick) always makes the list. When I first watched the film, I knew next to nothing about the plot, and it made the viewing experience ten times better, especially since I had a watch party with a bunch of friends who *also* had no expectations. I know A Simple Favor 2 is going to be just as sexy, unexpected, and gripping as the original. Keep reading for everything we know about the new movie, from the A Simple Favor 2 release date to casting announcements!

Is there A Simple Favor 2 movie?

Image via Lionsgate

Yes, Deadline confirmed in May of 2022 that we're getting A Simple Favor 2! The sequel film will be produced by Lionsgate and Amazon Studios, and reportedly, Paul Feig will direct again, while Jessica Sharzer will write the screenplay. I still talk about the script for A Simple Favor, so if Jessica is returning, I will be seated!

What is A Simple Favor 2 about?

Image via Lionsgate

A Simple Favor 2 will see the "return of Stephanie Smothers (Kendrick) and Emily Nelson (Lively) as they head to the beautiful island of Capri, Italy, for Emily’s extravagant wedding to a rich Italian businessman," according to the movie's synopsis (via People). "Along with the glamorous guests, expect murder and betrayal to RSVP for a wedding with more twists and turns than the road from the Marina Grande to the Capri town square."

While the first A Simple Favor ended with Emily in prison, I have no doubt whatsoever that we'll see her make a grand escape to coastal Italy. The only thing chicer than martinis and crime at home is martinis and crime while basking in the Italian sun.

When is the A Simple Favor 2 release date?

Image via Lionsgate

I'm expecting A Simple Favor 2 to hit our screens in 2025. Filming was originally scheduled for the fall of 2023, but after the Hollywood strikes delayed a variety of projects, production on the film was pushed to 2024. A Simple Favor 2 will reportedly begin filming in April of 2024.

Who's in the A Simple Favor 2 cast?

Image via Lionsgate

We can expect to see Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick return for this sequel. Henry Golding, Andrew Rannells, Bashir Salahuddin, Joshua Satine, Ian Ho, and Kelly McCormack are also set to star in A Simple Favor 2. As far as dream casts, I'd love to see everyone from Madelyn Cline to Jessica Chastain to Camila Mendes!

How does A Simple Favor end in the book?

Image via Amazon

The A Simple Favor book ending is *wildly* different than the movie ending! Instead of Stephanie turning on Emily and joining Sean, and then Emily getting run over by a car and put in prison for the murder of her father and sister (plus, you know, all the other illegal activity), Stephanie actually takes Emily's side.

In the book, Sean stays in a hotel while Emily gets custody of Nicky. The novel ends with the police finding Emily's ring inside the car of her main victim (a move that was probably orchestrated by Stephanie since Sean gave her the ring), and Emily deciding to pack up her life and leave.

Are you excited for A Simple Favor 2? Do you prefer the ending to the A Simple Favor movie or the book? Follow us on Facebook for more movie news!

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Lead image via Lionsgate