When it comes to cocktails, Fall is a great season for drinking them. Cinnamon, nutmeg, pumpkin, apple—it’s all just so delicious!
In the spirit of the season, I present to you Pumpkin Punch w/ Cinnamon-Infused Rum, courtesy of Kelly Carámbula and Serious Eats.
Ingredients:
For the cinnamon infused rum:
1 750-mL bottle of dark rum, like Flor de Caña, Gosling’s Black Seal, or Myer’s Dark
3 cinnamon sticks
For the punch:
10 ounces pumpkin purée
10 ounces cinnamon-infused rum
10 ounces sweetened condensed milk (vegan? Just melt some vanilla soy ice cream—but not that Soy Delicious Coconut Milk stuff. The coconut flavor will overpower the delicacy of the pumpkin)
10 dashes Angostura bitters (seems a bit excessive, but keep in mind it’s for an entire punch bowl)
Freshly ground nutmeg (for real—fresh nutmeg is not that expensive, and you can totally tell the difference)
Ice block or cubes
To Make:
Infused rum: Combine the cinnamon sticks and rum (keeping the rum bottle) in a large ball jar (or any wide-mouthed jar.) Seal and place in a dark area for 3 days, gently shaking daily. Once the cinnamon flavor is bold enough, remove the cinnamon sticks and pour back into the liquor bottle.
In a large punch bowl, combine the pumpkin purée, rum, condensed milk and bitters. Gently stir until fully combined.
Sprinkle freshly-grated nutmeg over the entire punch bowl.
(Check out Kelly’s blog Eat. Make. Read. for more of her recipes!)
Serious Eats recently profiled Jim Meehan of NYC speakeasy-era bar PDT for his selection of artisanal apple-themed cocktails, and the one I’m most desperate to try out myself is the Nouveau Sangaree. The combination of red wine, apple brandy, sloe gin and maple syrup really gets my taste buds going! Plus, it just looks awesome with the cinnamon-sprinkled apple slice garnish:)
Ingredients:
Ice
2 ounces Beaujolais Nouveau or other red wine
1.5 ounces Laird’s Bonded Apple Brandy
1/2 ounce Plymouth Sloe Gin
1/4 ounce Deep Mountain Grade B Maple Syrup
2 dashes Angostura Bitters
Garnish: apple slice sprinkled with cinnamon or nutmeg
To Make:
Fill a mixing glass with ice. Add wine, apple brandy, sloe gin, maple syrup, and bitters. Stir well and strain into a chilled coupe. Garnish and serve!
Remember to celebrate responsibly this weekend, and also that now until Tuesday, you can take 10% off your Ex-Boyfriend purchase by entering HALLOWEEN10 at checkout!
And as if that wasn’t awesome enough, be sure to check back tomorrow for the Fuzzy Friday post—new foster kitten pix are on their way!
Admit it: you’ve always wished there was a slightly more convenient, less-liquid-y way to consume your alcohol. Or maybe it’s just me.
Anyway, thank goodness for Camper English, the L.A. Times’ resident booze guru and acclaimed inventor of the Honey Badger shot. He had the same idea, and has been researching and developing the best methods by which to create solid forms of our favorite adult beverages. However, his (thus far) favorite method was actually passed on to him by Lauren Mote, the mixology half of Kale & Nori Culinary Arts, a Vancouver-based catering service. Click here to get the details at Camper’s Alcademics blog, but it basically centers around boiling down spirits to reduce the amount of water, and then agitating the resulting syrup until it begins to crystallize into a very adult-friendly form of rock candy. Once the syrup has been turned out onto a silicone mat and cools, just break it up into rocks and pulverize it in the spice grinder of your choice for a powdery libation, a la these campari crystals:
Recent Medal of Honor recipient USMC Sgt. Dakota Meyer (Ret.) just had one request when he went to pick up his hardware at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: dude wanted a beer with the prez.
Fair enough; I’d probably make the exact same request, and despite some push-back from certain citizens that think it’s perfectly reasonable to expect the person with the HARDEST JOB IN THE WORLD* to remain tee-total for 4 to 8 years, I don’t think it’s a particularly unusual request.
*Seriously, if I was the President of the United States, I think I’d have to be baseline buzzed 24/7 just to motivate myself to get out of bed in the morning and deal with Congressional ass-clowns all day—from BOTH parties.
But the most amazing part of this story is the revelation that they were drinking Barack’s House-brewed beer—in this instance a couple bottles of “White House Honey Ale”. Delicious!
According to CBS News, the Obamas bought brewery hardware and had it installed in the White House (on their own dime, so fear not, tax-payers) and officially became the first First Family to brew its own beer IN the White House. How baller is that?!
Moose saunters out of the woods on the outskirts of Särö, Sweden, finds some rotten apples at the base of a tree, proceeds to get blasted on the fermented (and therefore alcoholic) fruit, and gets stuck in the tree while climbing in search of more hooch. Rescue workers were called in, and were able to free the be-hooved lush. He then promptly collapsed to the ground to sleep it off, and was seen stumbling off in the morning with what I can only assume was a brutal hangover.
My first thought when I read this? “Hahahaha, animals can be so dumb!”
And then I remembered the storied list of places in which I have passed out drunk:
• Bathroom floor
• Hotel hallway
• Drunk tank (yes, in a real, actual jail, in a really uncomfortable chair, next to a really smelly drunk who kept elbowing me all night because he was shaking with the DT’s so badly)
• Stairwells
• Bathtub
I guarantee you there are others, but that’s the fun of getting blackout drunk—memory loss! A less-optimistic person might find that…depressing? But I like to think of it more like time travel!
Well, sort of. It’s hanging on by a thread in the mid-Atlantic, what with the hurricane-level showers we’ve been dealing with the last few weeks.
But I just got one year older today, I wore a hoodie for the first time in months, and Dogfish Head’s Punk’n Ale is finally in my tummy again. So it feels Fall-y. Decline-y. Dying-y.
But Karen at Tasty Trials offered up this last gasp of summery deliciousness recently—the Raspberry Limoncello cocktail:
To make:
1 lemon
4 basil leaves, roughly torn
6-8 raspberries
1/2 teaspoon superfine sugar (optional: if you’re a girl-drink drunk like myself, you’ll want the sugar. If you like your drinks crisp & tart, skip it.)
1/2 ounce limoncello
1 ounce Citron vodka
champagne, to top off
ice
Cut the lemon in half, then cut each half into quarters. Use 2 pieces per cocktail.
Muddle lemon, basil, raspberries in a glass, until raspberries and lemon are well mashed. Fill glass with ice. Add limoncello, vodka and sugar (if using). Stir. Top with champagne.
Drink up! I doubt there will be a post tomorrow, as I’m leaving ass-early in the morning for Chicago to sling my wares at Renegade Handmade this weekend, so have a fun one, and if you’re gonna be in Chicago, swing by Wicker Park (Division St. side) to say hi!
(Photo & cocktail courtesy of Karen at Tasty Trials)
This isn’t really news, but back in July the Rickey was declared the official cocktail of Washington, DC. Which is funny, because I feel that to live and work in the nation’s capital or root for their sports teams, I’d need way more than one cocktail to keep me sane (I should know; I’m a big ‘Skins fan). The good news is that the Rickey is a pretty basic drink that lends itself to a fair amount of variation. While I doubt I’d be a fan of the original “Joe” Rickey that uses bourbon in lieu of gin, I do like me some gin. So I scoured the webz for something awesome, and there is not much in this world that’s as awesome as booze and fire. Behold, the Rosewater Rickey:
Created (and photographed) by Jamie Boudreau at Vessel in Seattle, this is how it’s gonna go down:
Brulee in the bottom of a mixing glass:
5 pitted, brandied cherries
bar spoon of sugar
Angostura mist* (see below)
Fill with ice and add:
3 oz gin
1 bar spoon of rosewater
½ oz fresh lime juice
shake and strain into an iced Collins glass
top with soda water
*For Angostura mist, place equal portions of Angostura bitters and Lemon Hart 151 rum into an oil mister/sprayer.
To brulee the cherries, place them in your mixing glass, add the sugar, and mist the Angostura mixture through a flame.
Flame until sugar caramelizes.
As per usual, feel free to sub your own favorite spirit—I’d probably go with Hendrick’s for the gin, and since Lemon Hart 151 is extremely hard to come by, you may want a nice El Dorado (maybe the 8 year old?) or, in a pinch, Gosling’s Black Seal. Also, rosewater can usually be found in fancier groceries like Whole Foods or Fresh Market. Also-also, fire is awesome, but also hot. Be careful!
Poor Canada. Actually, no; poor Canadian liquor companies.
Like the U.S., Canada is saddled with a pretty sad rep abroad when it comes to its alcoholic exports. Both nations have thriving microbreweries, but by and large the rest of the world only knows us for Budweiser and Molson, respectively. Meanwhile, we’re inundated with awesome gin from Scotland (Hendrick’s), excellent vodka from—seriously—France (Grey Goose), and some seriously amazing rum from Portugal (El Dorado). Not to mention the tidal wave of awesome beers from Belgium and Germany!
Which means that the average Canadian beverage company is reduced to some pretty insane levels of gimmickry to make in-roads internationally. To wit: Frozen Ghost Vodka.
Sure, every product should have a story behind it, but to go to the lengths these guys have to drum up interest in some vodka? If it’s that awesome, shouldn’t its quality do most of the heavy lifting for you, marketing-wise?
This is kind of awesome. It’s courtesy of the mad mixologists at 12 Bottle Bar. My favorite aspect of this (besides the glorious confluence of gin, sorbet, and balls in my mouth) is the presentation in the erlenmeyer flask. The recipe is followed by a cool little essay on how the best food and drink appeals to all five sense simultaneously, hence the name GT-5 (gin + tonic + all five senses gettin’ their mind-grapes squished).
The GT-5
3 oz Gin-Key Lime Sorbet
2-3 dozen Micro Melon Balls
2 oz Leopold’s Gin (though I prefer the subtle cucumber-y-ness of Hendrick’s, which I think would pair especially nicely with the melon in this drink)
4 oz Tonic (I never gave much thought to tonic; it’s strictly a mixer with minimal flavor. But this is a nice breakdown of the tonic options out there, and anything that makes Booze’s ride to my tummy better is a-OK with this guy)
1 large stalk fresh mint
Boba Straw (you know, for that other ballsy drink, bubble tea)
For the sorbet, do this; it’s a variation of El Bulli’s lemon juice sorbet:
5 oz Leopold’s Gin (or, as stated above, Hendrick’s)
1 Cup Fresh Key Lime Juice, strained
5 oz Basic Simple Syrup
Mix all ingredients together and freeze
Blend the frozen mixture in a blender, and return to freezer
To assemble the whole shebang:
• Scoop out the melon balls, making them small enough to fit through the boba straw (melon ballers come in a variety of sizes, and can be purchased singly or in sets at most houseware-oriented stores like Bed, Bath and Beyond or Williams-Sonoma)
• When the sorbet is ready, add approximately 3 ounces of it to the bottom of a large glass
• Return the glass to the freezer, allowing the sorbet to set and the glass to thoroughly chill
• Just before serving, add the melon balls to the glass
• When serving, pre-mix the gin and tonic, then add to the glass (this will keep the melon balls from disintegrating)
• Add the mint and boba straw
• Slurp that shizz!
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