I drink a nutritious smoothie every single day and I like to add smoothie cubes – a healthier, probiotic-filled coffee cube – to all of my smoothie recipes.

It’s no secret that I’m madly in love with smoothies. I love their versatility and their portability. Plus, the child in me likes that they resemble milkshakes. And who wouldn’t want a milkshake for breakfast every day?!

When you make smoothies as often as I do, you start to get really weird about how they turn out. I, for one, prefer a pretty thick smoothie. I want to feel like I am treating myself to something amazing. I also like to have some texture and bite to my smoothies via chia seeds or flax seeds, but that’s just me. My husband, on the other hand, likes his super thin and runny.

But even though we may not agree on the consistency of our morning smoothies, we do agree on some things. We both prefer our smoothies to be chock full of good stuff – lots of veggies, fruit and probiotics. We also strongly believe that a smoothie must be ice cold – there are no ifs, ands, or butts about this one. Trust me – especially if you like adding avocado like I do — nothing says “barf” faster than a warmish, green smoothie!

So in the morning, we’re often throwing elbows around our Ninja blender trying to see whose smoothie goes in first. Truth be told, he always wins because he gets downstairs faster than I do.

Anyways, when we first started making our smoothies, we just used to use plain old ice. I mean, why not? Right? It’s readily available and it’s pretty fantastic at getting beverages nice and cold. However, it also has an unfortunate side effect; it can make your smoothies way too icy, way too watery and way too slushy. Now this may not bother some of you, but again, I have consistency quirks, so it really annoys me. I needed to find a way to keep my smoothies icy cold without being watered down.

Enter Mom’s coffee cubes…

You see, our Mom loves coffee. I don’t think there is anything she loves more in this world. Seriously, even her kids come second to coffee. (Read more about how our Mom loves coffee more than us here.) She loves coffee so much that she doesn’t like to waste any of it. And come summertime, she lives on iced coffee. But this coffee loving Mom of ours has even stricter rules about her iced coffee than I do about my smoothies. She only uses coffee cubes to keep her coffee chilled.

So what’s a coffee cube? Well, it’s just an ice cube made out of coffee – plain and simple.

This way, her insanely strong coffee will stay super strong and not get diluted with regular old water-based ice cubes. Now when I’m at Mom’s, I purposely add ice and lots and lots of milk to any type of coffee she is serving us because the woman makes it so goshdarn strong it can rot your stomach out, but it got me thinking…

What if I made Mom’s coffee cubes, but added some Kefir to them to make them nice and smooth in my smoothies? Well, the result is pretty fantastic. My smoothie cubes chill down my smoothies perfectly and add a lovely creamy texture tot hem. They also keep the slush factor at bay. Plus, they look quite lovely sitting in my freezer!

These smoothie cubes are incredibly versatile – just like my smoothies – and you can pretty much make them with any kind of liquid or pureed fruit and vegetables.