Daiso Iceball Maker

Price point: $2.00

Context: Daiso - the $2 Japanese department store

Before: About a week ago, I'd inherited a small fridge form a tenant and decided to clean it up and stock it. I was intent on trying to pimp my fridge to a hip-bachelor-pad standard, filling it with 6 brands imported beers, small cartons of sake, sparkling water and individually packed sachets of Ribena. All that was missing was ice. I'd seen quite alot of cool ice trays on Notcot and novelty shops in my time and was bent on finding something a little different for my 'bachelor-pad fridge'. So needless to say when I stumbled across this rather gangster looking iceball tray at Daiso for a mere 2 bucks I bought two.

First impressions: The theory behind the iceball maker is simple enough, fill the lower (larger) tray with water and then push the top moulding tray squarely down to displace the water, insert into cold place and then get excited!

Practically, it's a bit harder, I found myself displacing most of the water each time an never knowing if the ice ball shape had been filled completely, so I ended up taking the slightly over eager approach of just filling the entire device with water and then spilling a whole lot of water on the floor as I jelly-walked my way back to the fridge.

During: So, I was a little excited and couldn't keep myself from poking my head into the freezer every 3 hours to check if my gangster ice was ready for some gangstyle whiskey lay-backs. Sadly though, It hadn't frozen in the first 36 hours and I was beginning to worry.

Cranking the fridge power to 11 seemed to help though, and within another 12 hours I had 6 perfectly solid frozen ice balls. Not to mention they take several hours to melt and thus don't really require any refills.

After: I'd compare the effort of purchasing, freezing, then getting the balls out of the mould roughly to the amount of effort required to assemble a rudimentary ikea cabinet - it's a cheap method, that with a little patience and a lot of slamming gets you very satisfactory results. You may even feel a sense of pride after doing so. but I do question the necessity of such lengths to go to for a good looking glass of whiskey.

Mind you, I have seen the rather cumbersome, and expensive looking alternative, and I guess it's kind of worth it for what you pay.

Total Score: 5.5/10

Last words: Good for the bimonthly poker night, and the occasional bachelor moment but may land you in a domestic disaster.

If you liked this (and fancy something a little more challenging) you may also like:

Japanese Gangster movies, fancy Whiskey, FHM