Remove the frozen peas and this week’s pre-made lunches from your freezer immediately. They’re no good to anyone. You’re making space for storeys upon storeys of ice-cube trays to make alcoholic slushies.
That’s right kids, mamma's only sipping on ice-cold blended drink this summer.
The science – and I use that term strictly – behind slushies is they cool you down 92 per cent more than drinks in liquid form and your head gets a kick out of teetering on the precipice of brain freeze. There’s something special that happens at zero degrees Celsius. As mercury becomes liquid at room temperature, so too do drinks become instantly more delicious once they hit zero degrees. It’s pure chemistry.
For this very important and groundbreaking slushie experiment I’ll use the same technique to make every drink. It’s the easiest possible technique I could find sans professional slushie-making equipment (also sans pouring whisky into a 7-Eleven Slurpee – if that’s your bag, godspeed to you). First, freeze the drink as ice cubes. Then fire up the food processor and whiz them around until they form an adult frappe of sorts.
Now that the freezer is adequately empty, let’s see if these summer drinks will slushie.
Fancy Champagne
Some may question opening that fancy bottle of champagne you got for your wedding and pouring it into a candy-cane shaped ice-cube tray. And they would be right to question you. Good champagne is reincarnated as bin-juice when it dies an icy death at the mercy of a food processor blade. My god, this slushie was truly awful.
Beer
Cracking a tin after mowing the lawn on a hot day is satisfaction canned. Will popping beer ice-cubes and blitzing them at high speed have the same effect? Hell no. A glass of room-temperature pumpkin puree would be more satisfying. This tasted like the Esky ice your beer cans have been rolling around in after a day at a music festival. I can imagine sour beers potentially tasting better than this, but the stock-standard bitter lager I chose was not pleasant.
Moscato
Okay, this tasted amazing – and I’m certain no one over the age of 21 has ever said that about moscato. Many people find this sugar-loaded wine too sweet to drink regularly, but the truckload of sugar in this one really worked wonders. Imagine a royal-status Zooper Dooper in a satisfying blush pink. It’s definitely worth filling your freezer with moscato cubes to have on hand when the desire for an alcoholic pink slushie strikes.
Vodka and chocolate milk pre-mix
Yes, it looks like dog vomit. But if you can stop dry retching and get past that, you’re in for a treat. I really wanted to try a milky slushie and, to be honest, I didn’t think it would work. But it’s pretty damn good frozen. Like a chocolate Paddle Pop for people who haven’t had a chocolate Paddle Pop in 15 years. A word of warning though, there’s something about the combination of vodka and milk that doesn’t exactly freeze properly. It probably only gets about 80 per cent frozen, which meant I snapped an ice-cube tray getting these bad boys out. But it was worth it.
Summary
My scientific analysis is that you need a lot of sugar in your drink for an alcoholic slushie to make the grade. It makes sense, right? No one is bringing their own cup to the servo to fill up on frozen water – sugar is what makes a slushie! It makes no difference for alcohol-laden versions.
An easy way to work out what slushies is to ask yourself if you drank it on schoolies? Yes? Then it’ll probably nail life as a slushie. Green apple UDLs are up next.
