Halloween Giant Bloodshot Eyeball Ice Cubes

With Halloween just around the corner, we thought we’d do a simple and fun Halloween themed ice cube recipe!

With a little bit of effort you can easily create awesome looking giant ice cubes with bloodshot eyeballs floating in them!! They are the perfect way to add a bit of Halloween ghastliness to your Halloween themed party drinks 🙂

These don’t require much – maybe a little patience and a steady hand – and the results look fantastic.

• Tools:
  • Mammoth Cubes giant ice cube tray
  • Peeler or paring knife
  • Optional: small melon baller
• Ingredients:
  • Medium sized green olives
  • Medium sized radishes

First we need to prepare the radishes by peeling them while leaving just enough of the red skin to appear as veins.

It’s important to do this bit carefully so you don’t accidentally cut off too much red. I used a peeler without any issue, but a paring knife might be a bit easier.

Cut off the stem and root to get them out of the way. Then start peeling off the red areas but focusing on the green stem tip as the area where you will have the hole for the olive to go. When peeling, start by peeling off random small sections of red skin, and then slowly start to thin the remaining red areas so they look more like veins going up towards the green stem point (where the ‘olive iris’ will be).

When you are happy with the amount of red left, rinse of the radish and then take a sharp knife, small melon baller or rounded peeler and carve a small hole where the radish’s stem was. The hole needs to be about the size of half a medium olive.

Your radishes should look like this:

Next we simply half the olives and insert one olive half in to each hole you carved out from each radish.

TIP: Before cutting an olive in half, first push one in to a hole in a radish to see if it is a good fit. Do this to find an olive that fits well then cut in half and push it in.

Your radishes… sorry, eyeballs!… should now look like this:

Almost there! Now all you need to do is carefully place the eyeballs in to the troughs of your Mammoth Cubes tray and fill with water.

You may find the sizes of the radishes vary a lot, so just play around with the arrangement. Maybe have just one large eyeball in some cubes and a 2-3 smaller eyeballs in others. See what works best for you.

Next fill each trough with water. This is a bit more fiddly than filling an empty tray, so you may wish to use a small jug to pour the water in. Remember to leave a small 3-5mm gap at the top of each trough for water expansion.

If radishes float, you can wedge them in against each other. Also at this stage you may see some olives come free if they weren’t a tight fit, so this is a good time to check on them and re-insert loose olives.

TIP: Positioning the eyeballs can be tricky, but if possible ensure many of the eyeballs are facing the outside of the cubes – you want to ensure the olives are visible through the ice as they give the eyeballs their realistic look!

Place your Mammoth Cubes tray in the freezer and freeze the Halloween eyeball ice cubes for 6-8 hours (time required will vary depending on your freezer).

TIP: Ensure to not wobble or disturb the the freezing process for the first few hours otherwise you may dislodge some olives form their radishes.

Take your eyeball ice cubes out of the freezer and carefully extract them from your Mammoth Cubes tray. Letting the tray sit for a short moment can help make them a little easier to extract, although they should just pop out easily if gently pushed from the base side of the tray.

TIP: Let an ice cube sit for a few minutes before placing them in a drink to prevent them from cracking in the liquid.