Summer Idea #1: Raspberry Tea Ice Cubes

According to my dad, these are the "puppy days of summer." By that, he means the dog days of summer. Oh Dad. Haha.

But he is right in that these past weeks have brought Ithaca hot, extremely humid weather. Not the type of atmosphere for baking things. So instead, I've been coming up with cool, refreshing things to make. I currently have two more posts ready to be typed up and published, but I figured I'd start with the easiest!

This may also be the prettiest of the three.

Raspberry tea ice cubes! (Plus two watermelon juice ice cubes, because there was some juice leftover from our nightly fruit escapades.)

I paired these ice cubes (paired... who am I kidding. I mean, gracelessly dumped the ice cubes into a glass) with some lychee juice. This isn't a juice I usually see in grocery stores, but I went with my mom to one of the two local Asian grocery stores and the cute little juice boxes caught my eye!

If you can't find lychee juice, or if you'd just rather try something else, these ice cubes would also go incredibly well with lemonade or iced tea! That'd have a fun name: Tea Ice Iced Tea.

The tea ice cubes are also great for when a beverage otherwise tastes too sweet. A lot of the ice tea sold in stores tend to be too sugary for my taste but since I haven't added any sugar into the tea prior to freezing, the ice cubes can dilute the sweetness without weakening the flavor.

Anyways, this is so easy that I won't even call it a recipe; it's more of an idea, hence the title for the blog post. You could also choose to make this with a different flavor tea. Lemon, orange, apple, peach... they all sound tasty!

INGREDIENTS
- Juice of choice (for me, lychee)
- 1 teabag (like raspberry - look at the rhyming parantheses!)
- an ice cube tray? (technically not an ingredient...)

P.S. the peanut butter jar full of flowers is just for decoration. Not to eat.

Heat up some water, then let the tea steep until desired strength. Since this raspberry tea has a fairly strong flavor, I didn't let it steep for too long.

Pour into ice cube tray.

Stick it into the freezer!

Pour out juice (I probably had a little too much fun squeezing the lychee juice out of the juicebox) and add ice cubes!

So easy, and so pretty! And if the ice cubes melt, you can then call it "Raspberry Tea-infused Lychee Juice."

How fancy of me. It's all in the linguistics. Most importantly though: tastes delicious!

Enjoy!