The tray gets twisted, whacked, and half the ice ends up on the floor
The rigid tray comes out of the freezer welded shut. You twist it one way, then the other, then bring it down on the edge of the worktop, and eleven cubes come out at once — four into the glass, three onto the worktop, and the rest making a break for it under the fridge, where they will be found later as a small puddle. Then you refill the tray, carry it flat and level across the kitchen like a spirit level, and slide it back in behind the peas.
Open trays take on whatever the freezer smells of
Ice is mostly surface area, and an uncovered tray sits in a box with last week’s curry and a bag of fish. It picks up all of it, quietly, and you find out in a glass of water at eleven at night. Uncovered trays also spill on the way in, freeze themselves to the shelf, and refuse to stack with anything — so the freezer ends up with one flat layer it cannot use for anything else.
A soft cup you squeeze, with a lid on the top
This is a cylinder of flexible silicone about 7 cm across with a lid that has a fill port in the middle. Fill it through the port, put it in the freezer standing upright, and it makes a batch of small cubes. To serve, take the lid off, hold it over the glass and squeeze the sides — the silicone flexes, the cubes let go, and they drop straight in. Nothing is twisted, nothing is banged on the worktop, and nothing goes under the fridge.
Because it stands up rather than lying flat it uses the freezer’s height instead of a whole shelf, and several will stack. The lid keeps the freezer’s smells out. It comes in three colours — white with a yellow lid, blue, or grey — and the small-cube format is the useful one for iced coffee, water jugs and anything you actually want chilled quickly, rather than the single large cube that is really for slow-sipping spirits. It appears in our guide to kitchen gadgets worth the drawer space.
