Try This Neat Trick for Making Beautiful Layered Smoothies

One of the reasons that smoothies are so great is that they are almost endlessly customizable. Most smoothies — like this bright tasting strawberry and mango smoothie or this 5-minute breakfast smoothie — have a base of fruit with some sort of liquid, but you can get as creative as you want with those core ingredients and all sorts of add-ins. If you want to use an array of fruit in your smoothie, instead of just throwing everything in the blender, you can opt for making a layered smoothie that is as beautiful as it is tasty!

New York Times food columnist and author of the upcoming cookbook Dinner in One, Melissa Clark recently shared a simple and refreshing take on a layered drink with just a few simple ingredients.

Anyone who’s attempted to make a layered drink, whether a smoothie or a cocktail, knows that getting the layers right can be tricky — they often refuse to sit flat on top of one another and can blend together into a muddy mess. But Clark has an easy fix for this, which she demonstrates in the Instagram video: the spoon method.

After pouring one layer of the smoothie into a glass, Clark lays the end of the spoon over the top of the glass face-down and then pours the second layer slowly over the back of the spoon. This technique helps ensure that the second layer covers the surface of the first layer evenly without too much pressure in any one particular spot. You can see in my test photo below that the lines between the layers came out pretty clean!

Clark’s smoothie layers are mango and blueberry, but you could use this trick with any two flavors you like (take another tip from Clark and make the darker layer of the smoothie second so you don’t have to clean out the blender between batches).

But you don’t have to stop at just two layers — this trick works for a whole rainbow of colors, and you can customize it for any holiday (red and green for Christmas; orange and black for Halloween; purple, green, and yellow for Mardi Gras, and so on). I’ve made this same kind of drink in milkshake form, and it also works for thick cocktails. The possibilities are endless!