Cool off from a hot summer day with homemade snow cones! Crushing ice into “snow” in a Vitamix is easy as long as you don’t try to make too much at once. Just toss in ice and blend for a few seconds.
With a wide (low-profile 64-oz) Vitamix container, I’ve found that one ice cube tray’s worth works well. That’s about 18 oz of ice cubes, made from 12 oz of water. When I tried two ice cube trays, larger chunks of ice embedded themselves in the snow sticking to the walls and didn’t get fully crushed. Unlike almost all other Vitamix blends, the tamper is not helpful here because it just compacts the ice and snow into the bottom corners.
Ingredients
~2 cups ice cubes
Blend on high until fully pulverized, ~5 seconds.
I made a blue syrup using vanilla and butterfly pea flowers (leftover from my blue smoothie recipe).
Syrup Ingredients
1 cup water
1 cup sugar
2 Tbsp butterfly pea flowers
2 tsp vanilla extract
Heat water and sugar on stove until it boils, then remove from heat and add butterfly pea flowers. Leave flowers infusing until cool, then filter out the flowers by pouring through a sieve. Add vanilla and store syrup in the fridge.
Many people use squeeze bottles for dispensing the syrup, but a measuring cup with a pour spout works as well.
The vanilla gives it a pleasant flavor, and you could use more or less, depending on how you like it.
There are countless other possibilities for syrup. I found the traditional snow cone cups at Smart & Final, and they have a wide variety of premade syrups:
You can make your own fruit syrup by simmering fruit and sugar in water and then filtering. Some people use Kool-Aid mix to make syrup, and others use frozen juice concentrate. Or, for a less colorful but delicious option, try maple syrup.
Beautiful! Even the color is cool. Spiral cup holders are super elegant — I bet you didn’t get those in Smart & Final
You can fill it up with two trays but the trick is to not run the machine at high speed as that creates wet ice that sticks more to the edges of the container. You put your Vitamix on 3 to 5 and let it run without the tamper. You should get your dry like snow and four pillows at those lower speeds. Speed is not your friend here, you don’t need wet snow in 2 seconds at high speed you need dry snow in 15 to 30 seconds at speed setting between 3 and 5. Makes really nice fine dry snow for snowball fights on the west coast or snocones whatever floats your boat. Hope this helps.
This worked brilliantly – my kids loved their perfectly shaved ice. 🙂
Thanks for the tip. It worked great:
Thanks for this! I’ve been wet chopping the ice cubes and they get like slush with chunks of hard ice if it’s not timed perfectly. Thank you!!
Was wondering if anyone could recommend some good syrups to use in this snowball?
I am going to try buying the harder hawaiian syrups from Amazon. They have great reviews and use real sugar instead of corn syrup.