I want to drink that.

The bubble here is “cucumber alginate encapsulation.” Believe it or not, you can make a less technical version at home. Awhile back, Marcia Simmons from Drink of the Week and I made creme de cassis bubbles and floated them in champagne. Here’s a picture:

In our case, the bubbles were gelatin, creme de cassis, cherry brandy, and lemon. We mixed the ingredients together and then squirted them in a bottle of oil.

Then we stuck the bottle in the freezer overnight. The bubble formed as the gelatin hardened. We strained them, rinsed them off, and put them in the champagne.

Of course, our bubbles weren’t as nice as the ones in the video above. But it did remind me of this technique and made me want to play around with molecular mixology again.

If you want to play around with it too, you can check out our recipe on Marcia’s blog.

I am almost done with the blackberries I picked, so this is the last recipe I will be making with them for awhile. But you know I couldn’t let blackberry season pass without making a cocktail.

So I got together with Drink of the Week and made a Blackberry Smash. (The name makes me think of the Hulk. “Hulk smash!”) We crushed the blackberries with a little simple syrup, lemon juice, and mint, then mixed it with bourbon. Kind of like a mint julep, only with berries. Plus it’s pretty.

Recipe:

Blackberry Smash
(Makes 1 cocktail)

Ingredients:

3 oz whole, fresh blackberries
1 1/2 oz bourbon
1 oz simple syrup
8 small mint leaves
1 dash fresh lemon juice

Directions:

In a cocktail shaker, muddle all the ingredients so that the blackberries and mint are crushed. Fill a highball glass with crushed ice. Pour the drink over the ice. Enjoy!

Here’s a new drink that I did with Drink of the Week. It’s made with apricots! We combined a particularly nice one with rum, ginger ale, lots of ice, and a touch of bitters. It made a lovely little cocktail that is light and refreshing for a hot summer’s day.

The most important part here, of course, is to use good ingredients. That means get a ripe apricot, not those hockey pucks they usually sell in the supermarkets. We also used homemade cherry bitters from the Drink of the Week website. I can attest that these bitters work well and are easy to make–just steep the ingredients in rye whiskey for 14 days.

However, if you don’t want to bother with that, you can use commercially available cherry bitters or regular angostura bitters. (Be conservative if you go with the angostura bitters, since it won’t be as sweet as the cherry bitters and you’ll want to use less.) Or really, you could skip the bitters altogether, but the cocktail won’t have as refined a finish. It’s up to you.

Here’s the recipe:

Apricot Fizz
(Makes one drink)

Ingredients:

1 ripe apricot
1 1/2 oz rum
1-2 dashes cherry bitters
Ice
Ginger ale to top
Apricot slice to garnish

Directions:

In a cocktail shaker, muddle the rum and apricot. Add ice and shake thoroughly. Strain the drink into a glass. Add crushed ice on top of the apricot/rum mixture to keep the fruit from floating around in the drink and to make it extra cold. Fill to the top with ginger ale and add a dash or two of bitters on top. Garnish with a slice of apricot. Enjoy!

Hey look, Not Martha made her own gin. Or really, she infused vodka with gin-like flavors. I’m not sure this counts as gin, to be honest, but it looks intriguing.

Not Martha says that her gin tastes pretty good, although heavy on the orange zest: “It came out smelling vegetal, and while Scott reports that it tastes nice I still find it the orange zest a bit strong, adding a too-sweet note. I don’t dislike it, but I prefer my gin clean and crisp and, yes, pine-y. I realize that this might not be possible to create by infusing spirits.”

I don’t think you are going to save any money by following this recipe, but it could be fun to try. It looks easy enough, anyway.

(Image courtesy Cooking Light)

Most bar tools are unnecessary, but I could really get into having one of these channel knives for making a citrus garnish. A cocktail doesn’t look right without a fancy little garnish on the side, but cutting one of those lemon or lime curls with a knife is hard. Seriously, have you tried it? It’s practically impossible.

A channel knife has a u-shaped blade that makes it easy to get a professional looking citrus twist to garnish your cocktail. Prices on these gadgets run from $2 to $25. I like this one for $8 because it also doubles as a citrus zester:

Which is handy to have around for cooking, too.

No posts this Memorial Day, but I’ll be back on Tuesday. Have a great weekend.

Carrot juice is good for you, full of minerals and vitamins and so on. So why not ruin it by adding alcohol? Drink of the Week and I thought that sounded like a good idea, so we ground up some carrots and made a cocktail out of their juice.

We weren’t really sure how carrot juice would taste in a cocktail, but it turns out it is really good. After playing around with gin and a ginger liqueur–the same liqueur we used in the Green Tea and Ginger Cocktail–we came up with a drinking that is refreshing and delicious and very orange:

Ginger and carrots have long gone well together. Mixed with a good-quality gin, you end up with a drink that is a little bit sweet, a little bit spicy, and very carrot-y. With a touch of cinnamon on top, it is almost reminiscent of carrot cake, but not quite–this drink is too invigorating and not sweet enough to go there.

But there’s something weirdly wholesome about this carrot juice cocktail. In fact, this drink could be a good alternative for traditional brunch cocktails like the mimosa and the Bloody Mary. You can always use less gin if you don’t like it this strong. Recipe:

What’s Up, Doc? Cocktail
(Makes one cocktail)

Ingredients:

1 1/2 oz carrot juice (fresh is ideal, but you can also buy carrot juice at health food stores)
1 1/2 oz gin
1/2 oz ginger liqueur
Ice
Cinnamon to top (optional)

Directions:

Combine carrot juice, gin, and ginger liqueur in a cocktail shaker. Shake thoroughly. Put a few cubes of ice in a glass and strain the drink over the ice. If you want, add a slight touch of cinnamon on top. Enjoy!

(Image courtesy Montreal Gazette)

Ah the margarita. No other drink that I know of ranges in quality as much as this little concoction of lime and tequila. Personally, I loathe–yes, you heard me, loathe–margaritas made with margarita mixes or sweet-and-sour mix instead of juice. Unfortunately, most Mexican restaurants serve the drink this way because it is cheaper and less time consuming than using fresh juice, so many people don’t even know what a good margarita is. This is a sad state of affairs.

A good margarita uses freshly squeezed juice, a decent quality tequila, some kind of triple sec, and is not blended. I don’t have anything against a blended margarita, but it’s a different animal than the mixed version of the drink. If you want a traditional margarita, skip the blender.

The best margarita I have ever had was made by my husband from sour oranges that grew in the backyard of an old house. As far as I can tell, the only purpose of sour oranges is to make good margaritas. Of course, traditional margaritas use all lime juice. I don’t like that so much–I like just a little bit of sweet in the drink, so I usually put a some orange juice in to even it out. But that’s just my thing. If you want to be traditional, use lime. The important issue here is that you use fresh juice that you squeezed yourself from the fruit. Trust me, it makes all the difference.

Also, if you can, use a good tequila. I’m no expert on this, but I have found that Patron, Don Julio, Don Eduardo, Chinaco, and Tres Generaciones are all decent tequilas.

And then there’s the triple sec, which is a kind of Curaçao, a liqueur made on the island of Curaçao from the dried peel of the laraha citrus fruit–a kind of a sour orange. (This is another reason why I think sour oranges make the perfect margarita.) Triple sec comes in different brands, Cointreau and Grand Marnier being two of the expensive ones. I don’t have a strong opinion about which kind of triple sec to use because I find that I can’t taste the difference between a margarita made with Grand Marnier and a margarita made with a generic triple sec. Some people care though: here’s a debate on the subject if you want to read more.

And here’s the recipe:

Margarita

Ingredients:
(Makes two small drinks or one big one)

3 oz good quality tequila
1 1/2 oz fresh squeezed lime juice
1/2 oz orange juice (or you can use 2 oz of lime juice)
1 oz triple sec
Ice
A slice of lime to garnish
Salt to rim glass (optional)

Directions:

In a shaker, combine all the liquids. Shake thoroughly with ice. If you want, coat a margarita or martini glass with salt by pouring kosher salt onto a plate, wetting the rim of the glass, and dipping the glass in the salt. Strain the drink into the glass. Garnish with a slice of lime.

Happy Cinco de Mayo!

Here’s another champagne cocktail that I made with Drink of the Week. This time, we used champagne, bourbon, and cherries. Frozen cherries, to be exact:

I like using frozen fruit in cocktails because it doubles as a flavor component as well as the ice cubes. Cherries and bourbon go well together and feel very sophisticated on the palate. So sophisticated, in fact, that this is almost like drinking a Manhattan in champagne cocktail form. Recipe:

Cherries Jubilee Champagne Cocktail

Ingredients:
(Makes two drinks)

2 oz frozen cherries, approximately 12 cherries
3 oz bourbon
1/2 oz lemon juice
1 dash bitters
Champagne to top

Directions:

Put the cherries and bourbon in a cocktail shaker. Muddle the cherries thoroughly, making sure they are smashed and infused with the bourbon. Add the lemon juice and shake. Pour the contents into two champagne glasses. Top with champagne and a dash of bitters. Enjoy!

You know, sometimes Drink of the Week and I have trouble naming these cocktails we come up with. In this case, the possible names included:

Patty McCelery
The Celery VirGIN
Cell Block
Luck O’ The Celery
Celery McGinington

Irish Spring, however, sounded about perfect for this little green cocktail, which is just in time for St. Patrick’s Day. It is a mixture of gin, lime, mint, and celery juice. The celery neither overwhelms nor gets lost in the drink, but adds a refreshing touch to the cocktail.

Here’s the recipe:

Irish Spring Cocktail
(makes one cocktail)

Ingredients:

1 oz celery juice from 1-2 ribs of celery
1 1/2 oz good-quality gin
1/2 oz simple syrup
1/2 oz fresh lime juice
5-6 mint leaves
Ice

Directions:

Grate the celery ribs into a bowl. Then put the celery in a sieve over the bowl and mash until you get all the juice out of the celery.

Juice 2-3 limes for fresh lime juice.

Muddle the mint, simple syrup, and lime juice in a cocktail shaker. Add in the celery juice, gin, and ice. Shake thoroughly for about a minute. Strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with mint.

Cheers!

It hailed in San Francisco the other day. So Alcademics took advantage of the situation and collected the hail to make a Hailstorm Cocktail. Ha! Talk about waste not, want not.

San Francisco Hailstorm

Ingredients:

3 oz bourbon (Old Crow Reserve)
1/2 oz sweet vermouth (Martini & Rossi)
1/2 oz Trader Tiki’s Don’s Mix syrup

Directions:

Shake all ingredients over ice and strain into a glass filled with hail.