The Mustard AK Ice Cube Tray is another to add to our quickly growing novelty kitchen gadget selection on the site.
Mustard are a British based company who design and manufacture what they consider to be useful products with appealing twists. The AK Ice Cube Tray is just that. It keeps beverages cold and refreshing, whilst the ice is shaped as 3D AK-47 bullets. Well, in theory anyway.
The tray looks like a gun ammo case and makes ten medium sized ice cubes. It's made out of two parts. The first part, the base, this is where the water goes. We always fill up to the top of the base to ensure every bullet mould has sufficient water. Then we pop the lid on. This is the essential element to the 3D bullet shape, each bullet mould on the lid has one hole that allows the excess water to escape through when attaching the lid, so the bullet shape is created as the lid and base touch one another. The philosophy of this is to prevent excess water from ruining the shape.
We have made around eight batches of ice via the Mustard AK Ice Cube Tray and the results haven't always been fantastic. The bullet shapes we were presented with the first few times of using the tray were very often deformed and broken when the ice cube tray was opened. We could only blame the ice cube tray for this, it doesn't guarantee precision due to the nature of its flat design. But then we found that if we slightly over filled the tray, achieved by not pressing the base and lid so closely together, the ice cubes were far more successful and consistent in shape. The failure rate we've found is around four out of the ten ice cubes made in every batch, so definitely not perfect. Something we also experienced when over filling the tray was excess ice along the sides of the bullets, this was from not pushing the base and lid together firmly.
The ice cubes that did make it out looking like AK bullets were rather impressive. The ice effect in combination with this shape is nothing short of cool (literally). And will draw attention and flourish as a talking point at dinner party's and gatherings. They look very dramatic sitting within a drink.
To sum up, the Mustard AK Bullet Ice Cube Tray sets out to make novelty shaped ice bullet cubes. The execution of this can't be totally relied upon and that's a real shame. But when it does get it right the results are impressive.
