Home Baked Challenge...late entry

I discovered this fantastic blog over the weekend, and blogger Hannah has challenged her readers to a Home Baked Challenge each month. This month's theme is 'Frost'...I've spent 24 hrs wracking my brains for something that we could do to enter into the challenge. I even went to the lengths of making dough for cookies with the intention of icing them to look like snowflakes...but then inspiration struck...

Its more of an edible science experiment that I've been meaning to do for ages than a recipe, but hey!

We took some pressed apple juice, and put some in 2 seperate freezer bags, then filled 2 small plastic tubs with ice, but then added a handful of rock salt to one of the tubs. We put one bag of juice into each tub and put lids on them both, and shook them for about 5 minutes (we took turns as 5 yr olds don't have enough patience!!!!). We then took the lids off the tubs and were surprised to find that the experiment had actually done what it was meant to!!

The juice in the salt and ice mix had turned to slush, while the juice in just ice stayed as juice. Photo shows the 2 resulting juices! Both delicious!We noticed that the ice mixed with salt had almost completely melted, whereas the ice without salt had hardly melted at all.

Scientific explanation: salt lowers the melting point of water, so although the ice with salt had melted, it was still colder than the ice on its own. A better explanation can be found here: http://science.howstuffworks.com/road-salt.htm

B was very cross with me for deciding to do this just as he was serving dinner! He was even more cross when he couldn't explain what had happened in the experiment, so he had to go off and google it! We had been wondering how the ice could be warm enough to melt and cold enough to freeze the juice. My explanation of "it must be magic!" apparently wasn't good enough...!!