***This is a sponsored post. I was provided a sample of Cruzan’s Key Lime Rum for purpose of review. All opinions expressed, below, are my own and no other compensation has been exchanged. Now that that’s out of the way…***

Our friends at Cruzan Rum were kind enough to share with us their perfect-for-summer flavored rum-Cruzan Key Lime–and I was more than happy to give it a try. After all, with such wonderful memories of their Vanilla and Pineapple rums, I had high hopes for the Key Lime.

Nor was I disappointed!

At first sip, I was reminded of the taste of summer, childhood summers spent with Otter Pops and other super-sweet ice pops squeeze from plastic sleeves. Of course this one has a bit of a kick to it, but (as usual) there is no hard edge from the rum, just a pleasant warmth to counteract the tang of the lime. Todd didn’t think it was quite tart enough, but I stand by my first impression.

Of course, when thinking of lime libations, I often think of the Harry Nilsson’s Coconut song, and one of two images comes to mind.

This one:

(Direct link for the feed readers: Kermit the Frog – Lime in the Coconut)

Or this one:

(Direct link for the feed readers: Practical Magic – Midnight Margaritas)

So of course I was pleased to see this recipe that came along with my information from Cruzan:

Now, I had a coconut shell handy, but it was a souvenir from our cruise and I like to keep him on the shelf so I used a regular glass for my cocktail and I don’t think it’ll make that much of a difference–though if you’ve got a fresh coconut handy, by all means feel free.

For a frozen cocktail made with coconut cream and sweet rum, this is not an overly sweet drink. Like many of it’s kind, the cold does dull some of the rum’s edge, but it’s still noticeable, so you’re not likely to over-indulge without realizing it. The tart of the lime blends nicely with the coconut and really makes for a refreshing treat perfect to beat the summer’s heat.

Cheers!

Ah, Iced Tea. It got it’s start here on American soil when an English tea merchant set up a booth at the St Louis World’s Fair in 1904 but it was far too hot for anyone to want warm tea. Even though I’ve heard it said that hot tea can can cool you off, and supposedly does so faster than drinking a cool beverage, you’d be hard-pressed to convince most of the folks I know of that.

Saturday, June 8, 2013, is National Iced Tea Day.

I’m sure you can come up with plenty of ways to enjoy your iced tea, but I’m going to pull out a particular favorite from my 50 Shots of America series: South Carolina’s Hospitality Suite. Sure, sure, sweet tea vodka blends are all over the prepared drink market, but I still think my combination of peach schnapps and strong tea is far and away better. And while you can certainly shake it and serve it as a diminutive drink as originally devised (all the better to share with), you can also stir the ingredients below together and pour them over ice and enjoy this one all on your own.

Hospitality Suite

3 oz Brewed Tea, strong
2 oz Peach Schnapps
1 oz Tan Sugar Syrup (simple syrup made with half white and half brown sugar)
1/2 barspoon Vanilla (the real thing, no imitation extracts!)

Combine over ice in a large shaker and give it a firm handshake to a count of ten. Strain into 2 chilled cordial glasses. (Or combine over a full glass of ice in an Old Fashioned glass and sip for 1.)

Cheers!

***This is a sponsored post. I received a copy of Tequila Mockingbird by Tim Federle for purpose of review. All opinions expressed are my own. Now, with that out of the way…***

Unlike the last cocktail book that I expected to love and was somewhat disappointed by, I had a few misgivings about Tequila Mockingbird from some of the early information. That the first two parts were titled “Drinks for Dames” and “Gulps for Guys” had my inner feminist cringing but the ill-named sections actually did make sense as each featured works either by or featuring characters of that gender.

But it’s not all femme versus fella. The punny titles are non-stop, with such gems as

• Love in the Time of Kahlua
• The Turn of the Screwdriver
• Lord of the Mai-Tais [that would have been a much more interesting read, I'm thinking]
• The Phantom Tolljuice
• Prawn Quixote [this one a snack]

And if you enjoy my occasionally witty turn of phrase in the directions, you’ll enjoy Federle’s all the more.

Of all the works subjected to cocktail creations, I admit I was surprised to see children’s books in the mix–but there was no cause to worry, those are the non-alcoholic drinks. And then there are the edibles found in Bar Bites for the Book Hound and even a smattering of drinking games for those with a masochistic streak.

And then there are the illustrations by Lauren Mortimer. Wonderfully detailed pencil drawings grace many of the cocktail recipes and do a wonderful job of enhancing the humor throughout the book.

I read the first half of the book while sitting in the Jury Selection room–I was almost sorry I had to put it down and go to work when they released us!

Tequila Mockingbird, Cocktail with a Literary Twist is a small book, perfectly gift-sized, and a fun read. Bonus? A lot of the cocktails are built in a Collins glass so are truly a pour away from drinkable. And if you skipped any of the classics mentioned in this book, Federle’s descriptions might just pique your curiosity enough to pick ‘em up.

Cheers!

***This post has been sponsored by Kilbeggan Irish Whiskey; a sample was received in consideration for Tuesday’s review as well as today’s recipe share. Other than that, no further compensation has been received and the opinions expressed below are entirely that of the author. No further affiliation with Kilbeggan Distillery is being claimed. And now with that out of the way…***

Memorial Day. Unofficial start to summer. Reason for barbecues and pool parties across the nation. Last 3-day-weekend until Labor Day. Excuse for car lots to piggy-back yet another tent sale with the waving of the red, white, and blue.

‘Oh, yeah, and military stuff, too.’

At least that’s what it appears to mean to most.

Starting after the Civil War, Decoration Day has a fuzzy beginning with several cities claiming first rights–though decorating soldiers’ graves goes back farther than our War Between the States–on both the North and South sides of history. The dates observed were varied, as well, with May 30th being the common date in the North and, gradually, the rest of the country. It wasn’t until that 1967 act that normalized a bunch of holidays into their nearest Mondays, creating those beloved 3-day weekends, that Memorial Day shifted from May 30th to the last Monday in May (though it took a few years to be put into practice).

Granted, if you’ve never lost a friend or family member while they served in the Armed Forces, chances are this holiday might have less personal significance to you, but as a nation it’s a time when we attempt to honor those who died in service and a sense of nationalism overall. For some, this means visiting a relative’s grave and placing a flag or flowers thereupon. Others volunteer to beautify all service-member graves, relatives or not, as a show of thanks for their sacrifice. While others might be more inclined to reminisce with those nearest, some solemnly, others more in the style of an Irish wake.

Or at least that’s how I’m going to segue into today’s cocktail, contributed by Kilbeggan Irish Whiskey.

Kilbeggan Waterwheel
Recipe By Darren McGettigan, resident mixologist at Bar Beoga of the Menlo Park Hotel

1 1/4 ounces Kilbeggan® Irish Whiskey
2 1/2 ounces Pressed Apple Juice
1 1/4 ounces Pressed Pineapple Juice
6 Fresh Blueberries
1 Dash of Cherry Bitters
1 Bar Spoon of White Sugar
additional blueberries for garnish

In a Boston shaker, add blueberries and sugar, muddle hard. Fill the shaker with ice, and add all other ingredients. Shake well, and double strain into a tall glass filled with ice. Garnish with blueberries on a cocktail pick.

I can easily see this multiplied in a frosty pitcher to serve to your barbecue guests both on Memorial Day as well as the rest of your summer events. I’d skip the straining, obviously, and leave the bits of blueberries to float around for color, or freeze some blueberries to use as “ice cubes” to keep the drinks cool without further diluting it.

However you choose to observe this national holiday, please remember to do so responsibly and to use a designated driver or call a cab rather than risk some other sort of memorial being required. If you catch my drift.

Cheers!

***This is a sponsored post. Product was provided for the purpose of review, no other compensation was received. All opinions expressed are my own. Now that we’ve got that out of the way…***

Do you change your spirits when you put away your seasonal wardrobe? Frankly, the thought never occurred to me, but I can see how some would be inclined.

Just the way summer is prime time for light and airy clothes, light and airy alcohols seem to follow course. Whisk(e)y and it’s darker brethren are often put away as the temperature raises, but not everyone agrees with that process.

On Friday I’ll have a cooling cocktail featuring Kilbeggan Irish Whiskey, but before we get to that, let’s talk about the whiskey itself.

The Kilbeggan Distillery is the oldest licensed distillery in Ireland. Their distilling tradition goes back over 250 years and the pot still they use is 180 years old. You’d expect after all that time they must have hit upon something that worked, right?

Opening the bottle, it smells like whiskey–no big surprise there. Rich and lightly smoky, there was nothing unpleasant about the nose. The color is amber, not too dark, not too weak. And the taste? Like most whiskeys it’s sharp at first and burns a bit going down. That burn is what some people enjoy and not necessarily my favorite part, but giving the whiskey a few more sips allowed me to enjoy the warmth that whiskey so easily spreads and the rich flavor the whiskey has. And afterward your left with a decidedly sweet flavor, which is perhaps the most surprising facet to me.

Unlike Scotch, Kilbeggan isn’t overly oaky or peaty, and I can easily see how this would work in a fruit-based cocktail for the summer. Still, I’d be more inclined to pull it out on a rainy summer day, but at least there’s no real reason to put it away until fall.

Cheers!

Does chocolate cake sound good to anyone else right about now?

This coming Sunday, May 19, is National Devil’s Food Cake Day and I’m pretty much sold on the idea, truth be told. Might have to squeeze in some baking between appointments on Saturday.

What makes Devil’s Food cake different from other chocolate cakes? Good question! Generally speaking (i.e., according to Wikipedia), Devil’s Food cake usually contains coffee and usually uses cocoa powder instead of melted chocolate for the primary flavoring agent.

Of course it would have been super simple to construct a cake-sweet cocktail for today with chocolate vodka, chocolate syrup, some Kahlua and maybe some milk to tie it all together, but we’ve been down that road and that cocktail–while tasty!–has been done to death. Instead, let’s take a different path today. A more feisty path.

Does madness follow down this road? Maybe so, but it’s tasty madness.

Cocoa Diablo

2 oz strongly-brewed Coffee (preferably chilled)
1 1/2 oz Dark Chocolate Vodka (like Van Gogh)
1/2 oz Absolut Pepar
pinch of Spicy Rim Blend

Spicy Rim Blend: 1 part red chili powder, 2 parts powdered ginger, 4 parts cocoa powder

Run a wedge of lemon or lime around the outer edge of a cocktail glass then drag the rim of the glass through the Spicy Rim Blend. If you’re unsure of your guests’ heat tolerance, only rim one half of the glass.

Combine the cocktail ingredients over ice in the bottom of a shaker and shake like Mephistopheles, himself, is on your tail. Strain into the prepared cocktail glass and sip with caution.

If you make this with warm or hot coffee, you will end up with more water in the mix–this may or may not be a good thing to your thinking. Proceed accordingly. This looks like your average chocolate martini (sans milk, obviously) with a cocoa powder rim. Looks can be deceiving. Fact is, this is a more-spicy-than-sweet chocolate cocktail that lives up to it’s name. It’s not a relaxing cocktail to wind down a dinner with, more of a get the party started tipple.. And, yes, it might be useful if you feel like daring a friend to try something shocking.

Cheers!

I do apologize for missing last week’s AlcoHOLidays installment. It was a combination of an expected sponsored post falling through and me falling ill Thursday afternoon. It was, however, Cinco de Mayo last Sunday and I trust I’ve “trained” you well enough to know margaritas were in order, yes? Good!

This weekend, however, we are celebrating dear old (or not so old) Mom, as this Sunday, May 12, is the US observance of Mother’s Day.

While the Mother’s Day that is celebrated as a formal holiday the second Sunday in May was started by Anna Jarvis in 1909, there was another Mother’s Day that never really got off the ground. Back in 1870, after the American Civil War, Julia Ward Howe tried to start a Mother’s Day for Peace on June 2, though it was more about stopping the wars that were robbing mothers of their husbands and sons and promoting pacifism than it was honoring the institution of motherhood.

They say Jarvis was rather disgusted by the commercialism of Mother’s Day by the time the 1920s came around. Frankly, I can see her point. I will be glad when this weekend is over so that the incessant ads for flowers, cards, jewelry, dinners out, and anything else that could remotely please a mom. Do you know that Mother’s Day is the busiest restaurant day of the year? The automatic assumption is that Mom shouldn’t have to cook on Mother’s Day and heaven forbid someone else take her place in the kitchen.

But I digress…

The funny (read as: coincidental) thing about the post-Civil War Mother’s Day is that my favorite literary mother is Ellen O’Hara, from Gone with the Wind. And indelibly printing on my memory, just as it was Scarlett’s, is that she always smelled of Lemon Verbena.

Now, as I first read GWTW  when I was very young, possibly single digits-young, (and way before the Internet was commonplace in business, much less the home) my mind figured that lemon verbena must be some sort of perfume combining the scent of lemons and whateverthehell verbena was–probably a flower of some sort, I reasoned, and lavender somehow made it’s way into my mental estimation of the scent. Now, of course, I know that lemon verbena is a stand-alone plant in it’s own right, and that it smells like lemon and is used for its lemony oils, can be found in some teas, and does actually have small purple and white flowers.

Which is a very roundabout way of explaining the inspiration that went into today’s cocktail: lemon and lavender and all things lovely. Lemon and lavender are not exactly strangers to cocktails, as I’ve had a wonderful martini with those notes in the past. But I wanted less of a sweet, syrupy martini and more of a refreshing tall drink, one that would be at home on the back porch with a picnic or barbecue spread. Something that tasted like spring, and renewal–but without the bugs and dirt.

Lavender Lovely

3/4 oz Simple Syrup
1 barspoon dried Lavender
1 tsp Rosewater
1 oz Pisco
6 oz Sparkling Lemon Soda

In the bottom of a tall glass, muddle the syrup and lavender–you don’t need to crush the flowers into oblivion, you just want them to release some of their heady oils. Add the rosewater, Pisco, and enough ice to make the glass 3/4 full and give it a few stirs with the aforementioned barspoon, then stir in the lemon soda until chilled. Because the lavender will float on the top of the drink, I suggest serving this one with a straw!

I was debating base spirits on this one between rum and vodka, briefly considered cachaca for something a little different before I was reminded of the wonderful floral notes in KAPPA Pisco and there was suddenly no more deliberating! Pisco was the perfect choice for this cocktail but for those mom’s who are still expecting, I’m willing to bet that just using a bit more of the lemon soda (mine was California Juice Company Sparkling Meyer Lemon from Cost Plus/World Market) to make up for the missing Pisco would result in a lovely, all-ages sipper. If you’re short of sparkling lemon soda, I’d say some Lemon Perrier, the juice of one lemon, and a little extra simple syrup would do the trick.

Granted, I won’t be serving this to my own mother this weekend as she doesn’t drink any alcohol and overly-floral things give her a headache. Our tradition over the last several years has been to tour the local Parade of Homes on the Saturday before Mother’s Day and then go for a late lunch/early supper somewhere. It works for us.

Cheers!

——————–

On sale today is another book in the vast collection of cocktail books on the market: An Illustrated Guide to Cocktails: 50 Classic Cocktail Recipes, Tips, and Tales. Just like cookbooks in general, cocktail guides are numerous enough that there is a book out there that speaks to every type of cook or cocktail-er around.

From the press release:

Where there’s a cocktail, there’s a story. Shaken or stirred, on the rocks or straight up, liquor always has its characters, and from their exotic names to their romantic associations and cultural connections, every cocktail has a unique history.

I adore the premise of this book, as both a cocktail enthusiast and an illustrator. After reading through this petite volume, though, I’m left a little shaken, but not exactly stirred.

The writing is amusing, as befits Shtuhl’s past as a “cheeky beer columnist” and former speakeasy runner, and deviates from a lot of the standard stories you find in most cocktail guides. In addition to many of the major-name classics, he delves into several offshoots and behind-the-bar stories that you may not find elsewhere. The organization of the book, however, is willy-nilly and rambling. To even suggest that there is an organizational system might be going too far as there in no Table of Contents and no chapters to point to even if there had been. You have features titled “How to Like Gin” on page 91 that refer you to, one would infer, the author’s top three recipes on pages 126, 69, and 149 (in that order). There is a complete index in the back of the book, however, so we’re not left completely to our own devices.

If you enjoy stream-of-consciousness reading, then you might enjoy the distinct lack of order in this book. If not, you’ve been warned.

As for the illustrations, Elizabeth Graeber’s style is not one I’m overly fond of. It’s the loose pen with a wash of watercolor look that has roots in years of magazine illustrations, but often deviates from basics of anatomy or scale. What works in single-panel asides in a magazine, however, becomes a bit much, for this reader, when it’s covering an entire book, however short and small that book may be. Whether a choice of the artist or the book’s designer, many of the illustrations do not fully fit the pages they face. Case in point: page 22 starts with a “table” of whiskey vs whisky with a slushy-margarita machine underneath it with the universal ‘no’ sign (a red circle with a slash through it). Margaritas are not discussed for another 70 pages.

Color me confused.

But, as I’ve said, just as there’s a shoe for every foot, there’s a book for every bar. I would recommend this book for fan’s of William Faulkner and Kate Beaton (writing and art, respectively). Slip this into a gift basket with a bottle of premium gin, Fever Tree Tonic, and a bag of limes for a housewarming gift and you’ll be surely invited back for a themed cocktail night.

Pineapple Birthday Cake cocktail | Colorful party decorations courtesy of Oriental Trading Company

Okay, okay, while not a holiday in the strictest sense, birthdays are very important points in our lives and everyone has one (whether they choose to celebrate it or not). Since my birthday is next week I thought it would be a good idea to celebrate with a festive cocktail reminiscent of a decadent birthday cake with a fruity filling.

Pineapple Birthday Cake

2 oz Whipped Cream Vodka
1 oz Pineapple Juice
1/2 oz Butterscotch Schnapps
1/4 oz Amaretto

Combine all ingredients into a cocktail shaker half-filled with ice and shake to get the party started. Strain into the chilled cocktail glass of your choice and enjoy!

While this cocktail is similar to the Right Side Up (my take on the Pineapple Upside Down Cake Martini), the amaretto adds that hint of almond-flavored buttercream icing that is so incredibly delicious on birthday cakes that it’s tough to separate the two in my mind. For a purer “icing” flavor you could skip the pineapple and go with club soda or even just go straight alcohol if you were more interested in a high-test birthday cake shot.

Cheers!

We weren’t very good at restraint.

You had to go early–if you waited too much past noon to swing by they might be out of meatloaf for the day and you’d have to settle for fried chicken or some such. And if you were really lucky they’d have some containers of peach cobbler still.

We used to say that it was so rich it might kill you, but at least you’d die with a smile on your face.

Let me just revel in the memory of it for a moment, okay?

Since peaches are naturally high in fructose (which makes them high-FODMAP) and the doughy topping is, of course, full of wheat (another high-FODMAP ingredient), the peach cobbler from Early’s Kitchen is not something I’m likely to be savoring again any time soon. But in the spirit of Peach Cobbler Day, April 13, I thought I’d concoct a spirited version of the delectable summertime dessert instead.

Early Summer Peach

1 oz Whipped Cream Vodka
1 oz Pineapple Juce
3/4 oz Peach Schnapps
1/2 oz Cranberry Juice
1/4 oz Butterscotch Schnapps

Combine all ingredients over ice and stir until combined. Not too vigorously, think of it like a lazy summer Sunday afternoon and you’ll get it juuust right. Serve over ice in a low-ball or old fashioned glass.

I could have used peach nectar, true, but the point wasn’t to emulate biting into a ripe peach, it was to inspire the flavor of dipping into a gooey, sticky-sweet bowl of peach cobbler, maybe with a little ice cream on top. That’s what this combination does, quite handily. True, I added the bit of cranberry juice primarily for color, but the little bit of tartness doesn’t go amiss, either.

Whether you celebrate with the real thing or a cocktail version, celebrate something this weekend, okay?

Cheers!