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American Rose 👍

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Recipe

  • 45ml brandy

  • 5ml grenadine

  • 2.5ml anise spirit

  • ½ a peach

  • 125ml sparkling white wine

Peel and stone the peach, and purée its flesh (I used a food processor).  Put the purée into a shaker along with the brandy, grenadine and anise spirit, and plenty of ice.  Shake thoroughly, and strain into a wine glass (i.e. push it through a sieve and throw away the pulp).  Top up with the sparkling white wine (I used Cava).  Garnish with a peach slice (I forgot).

I found this recipe in a book called The Cocktail Bible in a pub in East Linton when we were recharging the car on a long journey.  We had ripening peaches at home, so I made this as soon as we got back, and it's fantastic! Exceptionally rich and complex, with every ingredient magnificently distinguishable but perfectly balanced.  This is what fizzy wine was made for! It's a pain in the arse straining the peaches, which were actually not ripe despite being in our kitchen for a fortnight, but in any case it was totally worth it.

The recipe I found asked for Pernod, which is a brand of the French anise spirit called pastis.  But for half a teaspoon, I'm guessing anything similar will do, so I used Turkish raki, which totally came through and added a lot.  I might do a special post about anise spirits at some point – I was reading some interesting stuff about how they differ, and how they've influenced each other over the years.  Watch out for that!

I'm attempting to reclaim sparkling wine for not-just-special-occasions.  It's not like it's actually that expensive, and there are loads of great drinks you can make with it, including with the cheap stuff.  I've started buying miniature bottles, since I often only want a glass or so, and it goes flat if you leave it in the fridge open.  Get me!

Cosmopolitan (II) 👍

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Recipe

  • 3 parts cranberry juice drink

  • 2 parts lemon vodka

  • 1 part triple sec

  • ½ part lime juice

Shake thoroughly with ice, strain into a cocktail glass, and add a thin slice of lime.

A definite improvement on my first attempt, which had more vodka and lime juice.  The recipe is only changed a little here, but results in a much less harsh taste, even without overdoing the fruit juice like some bars tend to.  This recipe is definitely the one I'll settle on, because it's just superb – fresh, fragrant, like a little oasis.  I can see why it's Claire's favourite.

By the way, the fact that it's lemon vodka is a big deal – it's very different from normal vodka.  I expect you could get a similar result with standard vodka and lemon zest, but if you can get the real stuff, it's worth it even just for this one drink.

Pink Lady 👍

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Recipe

  • 2 parts Passoã

  • 2 parts lemon vodka

  • 1 part maraschino

Shake with ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

I threw this together in about 20 seconds when I was already drunk, the EU election results were about to come on TV, and Laura requested "something fruity".  It actually wasn't too bad, with a nice crisp bite, though it could've done with a bit of sweetening and a garnish – maybe a cherry and a lemon twist, or maybe even a slice of apple.  The name was Laura's.

It looked beautiful, practically glowing pink.

Rob Roy 👍

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Recipe

  • 2 parts Scotch whisky

  • 1 part red vermouth

  • A dash of Angostura bitters

Stir together with ice, and pour into a cocktail glass. Add a cherry.

Claire actually made this one for me, a unique reversal in a usually one-way cocktail-making street.  She did an excellent job, and produced a nice cocktail.

I've posted a few times about Manhattans and their variations (1 2 3 4) and I've experimented with different types of whisky.  In this, we abandon American whiskey entirely and opt purely for Scotch, a bold move that apparently pays off.  Being two thirds of the drink, it exhibits the flavour of the particular whisky in question very well (in this case, Famous Grouse) but also makes for something that's unquestionably a cocktail.

Perhaps one day I'll have the guts to use a single malt.  Hopefully the whisky police won't arrest me.

EDIT (2020-11-02): At Lydia's suggestion I did eventually try this with a nice clean single malt, Arran. It was nothing short of superb.

Kir Rampant 👍

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Recipe

  • 25ml elderberry liqueur

  • 1 flute sparkling white wine

Pour the liqueur into a champagne flute, and fill up with sparkling wine.

I wanted something to do with the elderberry "elixir" Laura gave me for my birthday, and I was reminded of the Kir Royale, a crème de Cassis–champagne mix that's highly prized, and of which I've made a raspberry variant in the past.  I figured elderberries are basically the same as blackcurrants, though with a more Northern twist, so I settled on a royal Scottish name for this elderberry Kir Royale: we talked about Kir Balmoral, and even started looking up words in Gaelic, but I settled on a name that matches a drink fit for a lion: Kir Rampant!

We had the smallest bottle of prosecco ever, so we barely managed to fill three flutes half-full and it was far too strong – but it tasted good anyway!  I'll try it again with more wine. Thanks, Laura!

Casino (II) 👍

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Recipe

  • 4 parts gin

  • 1 part maraschino

  • 1 part lemon juice

  • 1 part orange bitters

Shake with ice, and strain into a cocktail glass. Add a cherry and a twist of lemon peel.

Much, much better than last time.  For the record, orange bitters are nothing like aromatic bitters, and my earlier attempt was nothing like a proper Casino.  I guess you can see that just by looking at the pictures.

This is an excellent drink, with big flavours that you don't need a great palate to appreciate.  The orange bitters are the most obvious component, with a nice zesty tang over the pleasing balance of the other three ingredients (strong, sweet and sour respectively).  It also looks pretty good – I guess you could easily mistake it for an aviation, in style as well as in taste.

I'm proud to announce that I'm now reasonably competent at making twists of lemon peel.  These looked good, and stayed in neat helical shapes even after the drink was finished.  The trick is to twist them up really tight to start with, then pull the ends like stretching a spring, before dropping them in. Apparently it also doesn't hurt to leave a little pith on them (something I've been spending way too much time trying to avoid).

Scotch–Bourbon Manhattan 👍

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Recipe

  • 1 part Scotch whisky

  • 1 part bourbon whiskey

  • 1 part red vermouth

  • A dash of Angostura bitters

Stir thoroughly with ice, strain into a cocktail glass, and add a cherry.

My French cocktail-shaker has markings for various cocktails on the side, and none of them match the IBA recipes. In the absence of rye whiskey (the optimal ingredient for my kind of manhattan) I decided to follow the shaker recipe (pictured). The result was a particularly smooth, almost watery taste, reminiscent of a very cold dry martini. I guess it's a result of more whiskies being blended together and smoothing each other out.

For the record, I used The Famous Grouse and Jim Beam. It wasn't up to the rye version, but it was still good. Stand by for a future post for a Rob Roy, which ditched American whiskey entirely in favour of Scotch.

Bitter Soda 👎

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Recipe

  • 50ml sugar syrup

  • Sparkling water

  • Angostura bitters

Put the syrup in a collins glass, and fill to three quarters full with the sparkling water.  Add some bitters and stir, aiming for a uniform dark orange/pale brown colour.  Keep adding more bitters to taste, then top up with ice.

A little disappointing, though not unpleasant. I think the sugar and fizzy water together were a bit sickly, with not enough to cut through them. My collaborator who suggested this did say that they like a lot of bitters in it, so maybe I underdid it. Next time I'll either use more bitters or some lemon juice, to balance it a bit better.

Amaretto Sour 👍

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Recipe

  • 2 parts amaretto

  • 1 part lemon juice

  • 1 part sugar syrup

Shake thoroughly with ice and strain into and old-fashioned glass filled with more ice. Add an orange slice and a cherry. Superb!  I just love the taste of marzipan, and have done since childhood, making amaretto a really great discovery when I first had it a few years ago. This drink is unapologetically sweet, a real dessert cocktail.  It's often made with egg white, which I think is there to make it a little creamier, but I rarely have eggs in the house these days, so I found a recipe without.  I actually forgot to add a dash of bitters, which I might try next time.

Age-check Martini 👎

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Recipe

  • 50ml Passoã

  • 30ml vodka

  • 20ml lemon juice

  • 1 cap vanilla extract

Shake with ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

It seems the only thing anyone knows about Passoã is that you can use it to make a Pornstar Martini.  I sometimes get tired of deliberately taboo cocktail names which tend to be slightly funny first time ("could I have an Orgasm please?") and then get more and more tedious when you're ordering your fifth one because you're an alcoholic.  Anyway, I tried a Pornstar Martini the other day in a bar, and it was quite good!  Sadly, you need at least prosecco and fresh passion fruit to make one, so I wasn't ready to make my own amateur drink just yet.

In lieu of the real thing, I copied this dodgy recipe from the side of the Passoã bottle, which gave it the unexpectedly conservative name "Passoã Star Martini".  I didn't even have vanilla vodka, so I just put in plain vodka and out-of-date vanilla extract. It turned out a bit sour and boring, and I couldn't really taste the vanilla.  I suspect real vanilla vodka would've had some extra sugar, but I also suspect this just wasn't a great recipe.  So I've decided to name it after the British Government's latest attempt to protect the public from immoral content online.

I'll try again when I've got fresh passion fruit.  And I'll try to post the results before the 15th of July – otherwise this blog might end up on a government list, and you'll all have to send me a copy of your birth certificate before you can read it.