Entries categorized as ‘cocktail’
Here’s a cocktail I invented last year and was thinking of today. It’d be a good antidote for the cold windy rainy weather that has been assaulting San Francisco.
The Crispicy
2 oz Ginger Cardamon Vodka
1 oz Black Pepper Syrup
Juice of 1 lemon
Shake with ice and strain.
This makes a good batched and bottled cocktail to give to friends. Just mix up multiples of everything but the lemon juice and keep it in the fridge. Bottle it and gift it with lemons. Instruct your friends to fresh squeeze 1 lemon with 3oz of the mix.
Black Pepper Syrup
1 cup water
1 cup sugar – it’s nice with brown sugar for color & extra flavor
15 or so black peppercorns
Boil 5 minutes, cool, then store in a glass jar in the fridge. Splash in an ounce of vodka to preserve it if you won’t use it up in the next week or two.
Ginger Cardamom Vodka
20 lightly crushed green cardamom pods
20 slices 1/4inch thick ginger
750ml vodka
Combine in a glass container. Shake and check every day. I think it’s usually done (flavorful enough) within a day.
Categories: cocktail
Tagged: cocktail, vodka
This morning I spotted a pint of heavy whipping cream in the fridge about to expire. I was browsing twitter updates and saw a link to a recipe for Homemade Bailey’s by @mizmaggieb. Lightbulbs in my spacecase mind! I could double the recipe and use the whole pint of cream and then bottle up the result and give it to friends.
I dropped Lucy off at school and picked up some instant coffee from Starbucks. Then I walked down to Bi-Rite Market to get some pastured eggs – they are the only store I know around the neighborhoods I walk (Mission, SOMA, FiDi, Castro) that regularly have pastured eggs in stock. I expected to find eggs from Eatwell or Clark Summit or Soul Food Farm or Marin Sun Farm, and then was pleased to find pasture raised eggs from farms I’d never heard of: Lazy 69 Ranch and Sinclair Family Farm.
I picked up a bottle of Bushmill’s whiskey which reminded me of meeting Moya in 1997 and of marrying her for the 3rd time in 2008.
Irish tradition (I married an Irish gal)
I got another can of sweetened condensed milk which always reminds me of my fabulously missed late grandma. And some Recchiuti extra bitter chocolate sauce which is probably heavier than the recipe requires, but it looked so much more delicious than the bottle of plain chocolate syrup. Why skimp when the ingredients list is already so decadent?!
I dumped all of the ingredients in the mixing bowl. It’s a simple recipe – you just whip together fresh eggs, almond extract, vanilla extract, chocolate syrup, instant coffee granules, sweetened condensed milk, whiskey, and whipping cream.
While I was scraping out the cans of sweetened condensed milk I was reminded of my grandma’s voice telling the story of how her mom would always use every last drop of sweetened condensed milk from a can by pouring coffee in the can and dissolving the last bits of sweet milk with the coffee.
every last drop of sweet
I don’t like milk in my coffee but I’ll drink coffee out of the remains in a can like this.
Here’s the finished product ready for a label:
Store in the fridge, not by the tree
Categories: cocktail · happiness · storytelling
Tagged: inspired
Pre-mixed Winter Tale Cocktail
I’m going to label and decorate and gift these within the next couple of weeks. I wish I’d made more! I don’t remember the size of these bottles but I think they hold 12 ounces.
I considered just mixing the vodka with the syrup and giving lemons on the side with a recipe so the lemon juice would be more fresh in the final cocktail that is shaken and strained and sipped. Then I figured this would be drunk up rather quickly and the ease of just pouring, shaking, straining (or just pouring over ice and stirring), would be nicer for the gift recipients than giving them the additional task of juicing lemons.
I didn’t know what to do with the vodka once it was infused. I rummaged through our kitchen looking for ideas and inspiration. We have a bunch of unused spices that we “inherited” from a friend who died a couple of years ago and I like to try them out in new things. One of them is Penzey’s Mulling Spices. We have lots of citrus in the fridge (limes, lemons, oranges, tangerines, clementines). I smelled the mulling spices, the infused vodka, the clementines, and I was inspired.
Here’s the recipe for the batch that I made:
Cranberry cinnamon stick vodka:
- 1.75 L vodka
- 2 pints fresh cranberries
- 1 vanilla bean
- 6 cinnamon sticks
Mulling spice clementine syrup:
- 4 cups sugar
- 2 cups water
- 2 T mulling spices (I used Penzey’s)
- 2 clementines with leaves attached
Mixing:
- a lot of lemons
- 2 weeks of time
Infuse the vodka:
- Crush the cranberries. I meticulously cut each of the cranberries in half and then used a potato masher to mash them. I considered blitzing them in a food processor but thought that might make them too mushy.
- Split the vanilla bean lengthwise
- Pour the vodka into a large jar (I use a 3 L jar)
- Add the crushed cranberries, vanilla bean, and cinnamon sticks
- Shake or stir and store in a cool dark place.
- After 1 day, remove the vanilla bean.
- Shake or stir daily.
- After 6 more days, remove the cinnamon sticks.
- Shake or stir daily.
- After 7 more days (or taste daily and stop when you like the taste), strain out the cranberries and anything left behind from the cinnamon sticks and vanilla.
Make the syrup (this will make a bit more syrup than you need for the batch):
- Use a peeler to remove the peel in long strips from the clementine.
- Tear the clementine leaves
- Heat the sugar and water until it dissolves.
- Remove from heat and add the mulling spices, clementine peel, and clementine leaves.
- Cover and let it steep for approximately 12 hours.
Mix the cocktail:
- Juice a lot of lemons if you’re going to make a batch – I probably juiced 15-25 lemons to make this batch
- 2 cranberry cinnamon stick vodka
- 3/4 mulling spice clementine syrup
- 3/4 lemon juice
Categories: cocktail
Tagged: batch, cranberry vodka cocktail, mix
I watched Mad Men season 3 episode “My Old Kentucky Home” earlier this week and giggled when Joan served cocktails in the same glasses that we have. Now if only Joan would come to our house and mix drinks with us.
Here are some of our glasses sitting on top of counter ledge getting ready for a dinner party a couple weeks ago
Here they are in Mad Men (via iTunes this week – I think this episode won’t air on TV til end of August)
Categories: cocktail · happiness
Tagged: cocktail, glasses, madmen
