Cocktails 12.01

Okay, so I may not have mentioned yet on this blog but I ADORE making cocktails - the more colorful, creative, and esoteric the ingredients, the better!  Anyhow, I recently went through a St. Germain phase - it is a French liquor, ends up being about $35-40 dollars a bottle depending on tax, and is from Elderflowers.  The taste is difficult to describe - it is flowery, tropical, fruity, also with a hint of tea flavor.  It is a rather delicate flavor, and the proof is low enough that you can drink it on the rocks really easily.  Speaking of rocks, I think my order of stone cocktail rocks just arrived!  Can't wait to put those to use!  Anyhow, I was making tons of cocktails with it - the cocktail that started it all had rose water, grapefruit juice, vodka and St. Germain liquor in it and was absolutely wonderful.  Tasted it for the first time on my trip to Portland, OR.



Anyhow, that phase was fun, and I will certainly get some St. Germain again at some point in the future, but for now I'm thinking of holiday-themed drinks.  I know there are a million out there, mostly mixing eggnog and rum, or brandy, or anything to get you liquored up enough to stand being around tons of family members you haven't seen in forever who annoy the crap out of you, or children who are incessantly begging you to give them stuff or pay attention to them.  I know I say that like someone who may have been there but I really haven't - no children of my own, essentially no extended family (you'd be surprised, besides my mom, dad, and sister, I just have one grandma, one aunt, and a cousin's family who has two kids and I see them once a year, and not on holidays).  My boyfriend has added his family to the mix now, however, so that shall be quite interesting.

Back to the cocktails - I subscribe to the free weekly newsletter from The Spirit, which is a website devoted to liquors, cocktails, they have a magazine, and the website has a really nice design, which is one of the main reasons I like it, to be honest.  They also have tons of pictures.  Anyhow, below is the ingredients for one of their seasonal cocktails I saw in their thanksgiving newsletter.



Serving Size: 1 

1 ¾ oz Bulleit or Buffalo Trace Bourbon
1/8 oz St. Elizabeth All Spice Dram
2 sprigs of thyme, leaves only
2 tbsp pumpkin spice puree
1 egg, whites only
½ oz marzipan syrup (2 cups water, 5 oz marzipan paste, 1/8 cup sugar, melted into milky syrup)
½ oz fresh squeeze lemon juice

Place liquor, thyme, pumpkin, lemon, marzipan syrup and egg white into shaker and shake vigorously for 20 seconds without ice. Add ice and shake again for another 15 seconds. Fine strain into a coup glass and serve as is. 

Pumpkin Spice Puree


1 14.5oz can pumpkin puree

1 ½ cups water

1 cup white granulated sugar
¼ cup brown sugar
1 tbsp fresh lemon juice
½ tsp vanilla extract
¼ tsp ground cardamom
¼ tsp ground cinnamon
¼ tsp ground nutmeg
¼ tsp ground, dried ginger
1 tsp molasses (optional)


I made the cocktail - here are pictures of the more challenging parts


Step 1: Pumpkin puree with added sugar and spice (and everything nice - haha, I kid) 


Next I cut the marzipan paste (which comes in a quantity of 7oz) into 5/7 so that I could get 5 ounces, then broke it into pieces to increase surface area and thus decrease dissolving time in the water-sugar mix.  Below you can see that it did eventually turn into (as described) a milky fluid.






Here are all my new fluids that I purchased - the bourbon and the kracken spiced rum were for the great pumpkin cocktail (I couldn't find the all spice dram, so I used spiced rum and added a dash of allspice) and the apple cider and brandy were for a cocktail of their own.  The ginger beer and sarsaparilla was for the kraken rum, because on the website the kracken rum goes with coke, ginger beer, ginger ale, and root beer/sarsaparilla, so we tried that and everyone agreed the flavors all complemented each other very well.  Tonight was a fun night of cocktail experimentation and fun with friends.  We are planning to do a truffled mac and cheese with kielbasa night on Wednesday, and my boyfriend and I will be going on the Napa wine train on next Friday!  That shall be amazing!

Comments

  1. wow that drink sounds awesome. complicated. but awesome

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