TGRWT #17: Rose and Apple Hot Honey Toddy.

This month is National Whisky Month in Scotland. It has also the middle of National Honey Week this week. Naturally I decided to try and celebrate these two events by smooshing them into this month's TGRWT: Apple and Rose.
I've not done a cocktail in a while so I decided that rather than making more ice-cream (which I imagine would work well), having still not finished all the Chicken and Rose from last TGRWT, I would celebrate whisky month with a good old fashioned Scottish Cocktail: The Hot Toddy.

A Hot Toddy, for those who don't know, is a mixture of honey, whisky, hot water and lemon. It's great for cold nights, sore throats and flu (even swine flu). It's also just a cracking drink.

I couldn't afford a decent whisky or some proper heather honey this week, although I think that they would make a huge improvement to the drink. I ended up with Scotmid's own blend whisky (which is not all that bad really) and a Chilean honey, which has a nice taste of honeysuckle flowers but doesn't really enter into the spirit of a British Honey Week.
If you have some homemade apple juice I'm sure that will make a better drink too.

Here's the drink I made:

Rose and Apple Hot Honey Toddy.
Heat up enough apple juice to fill your mug.
Take off the heat and put in a handfull of dried rose petals.
Leave for 3 or 4 minutes and strain.
Stir in a couple of teaspoons of honey (to taste).
Add a generous slug of whisky (Scotch thankyou very much)
Taste and add some rose water if you think it needs it.

Enjoy.


This really is quite a posh version of a very un-posh drink but it tastes great. As I've said some better ingredients would lift it up to being an exceptional drink (the version I made was more a proof-of-concept as much as anything else, but a very enjoyable one).
The balance of rose is quite a delicate thing so be slow with the amount of rose water you add. If you put the petals in when the apple juice is still over the heat they can go a bit mushy.

Halloween Molecular

Well. I've taken my first stab at, what I call, "the poncy bit" of molecular mixology - turning stuff into foams and gels. Here's my halloween cocktail (made with rum, lemonade, caramel/blue curacao syrup. Making the sugar into caramel before adding the water to my syrup was a stroke of genius and made what was going to be a sweet, tasteless cocktail, abeit pretty, into something a bit more multi layered (tastewise). The poncy bit is the orbs, which are just orange and blackcurrant juice which i've spherificated (is that a word? oh well the whole field is full of made up words, why not add a new one) with agar.

Lashings of Cream

I looked at the title of this Mixology Monday (MixMo XXXII - "Guilty Pleasures") and thought “well none of the cocktails I like are really that bad for you”. I'm not a fan of really sugary, sweet drinks, not being one of the army of orange tanned, pink clad girls who say:

“Aye? I dinnae ken whit a Sidecar iz. Ah' like them cocktails though, sweet yins that ye' cannae taste the alcohol in.”

(Translation for non-Scots: “Yes? I don't know what a Sidecar is. However I like cocktails, the sweet ones in which you can't taste the alcohol”)

But a guilty pleasure doesn't have to be sugar fuelled, although I can hardly say I don't have a sweet tooth (I eat brown sugar cubes for goodness sake! - there's a guilty pleasure for you). What will it be? Piles of E numbers? Tubs of fat? Buckets of alcohol? What do I drink that people keep telling me is bad for me?

Nothing really.

I have the view that “if you don't want to get fat then just do more exercise and eat what you want” - food is far too important and should be celebrated. Why eat crap that makes you miserable? My peers and family know my views, I'm pretty outspoken, so they don't warn me of the “bad stuff” I eat or drink - they just want a quiet life.

The main fact is: I don't feel guilty by what I consume. Life's too short.

Of course, it goes without saying: everything in moderation... but things lose some of their pleasure if you have them too much, so as long as you stop when you don't want it any more then it should be self-regulating.

With all that in mind though, I will have to choose a drink and I've come up with a corker:

The White Russian

I discovered the Caucasian, as many others before, from the film The Big Lebowski. Immediately after the film I rushed out and bought some cream.

4 parts Vodka (I have no preference to the type)

2 parts Kaluha

3 parts Cream

Build over ice in a rocks glass

It was great. Not too sweet. Dark. So creamy that it enveloped the cockles of your heart (not just warming them). Enough of an alcohol edge that you didn't gulp it down.

I finished it and.... no I shouldn't have another one. Okay I won't. One's enough...... but.. I've got all of that cream, and I'm not going to use it for anything else, and it's not as if the drink is hugely alcoholic.... okay then... one more.

And that is why I've chosen the White Russian as my guilty pleasure. Most drinks you can make up out of a well stocked cocktail cupboard at any time. If you decide to make a Caucasian... you're going to need cream. And there's no point getting one of the piddly little tubs, they cost almost as much as a pint. If you don't drink it, the cream'll go off. So you might as well just have another one.

I'm not complaining.

{image from www.thedudeiseverywhere.com}

Cabana Cachaca

This time on Monday I was in London for a cocktail competition to promote Cabana Cachaca. It was held in the Floridita. An interesting atmosphere change from the one I did in September up in Edinburgh (I don't know why I'm saying "up", I'm here all the time) in that it seemed to be more about image and the pazazz (sp?) of the presentation, than of the drinks themselves.. although there were 40 odd entrants so I imagine that they start to blur into each other a bit. I didn't mind it really (being at home in a, .. well .. acting essentially, environment).
Anyway. Here's my two drinks. The usual setup: One twist on a classic and one "contemporary" (although by contemporary I don't mean as in dance - "My drink is an empty coconut shell, to reflect the inner turmoil of an unenlightened being" :> )

Drink 1: A Burst of Passion.
(Recipe is for 2 drinks and measures in 25ml)
2 measures Cabana Cachaca
1 measure Gomme
1/2 measure Lemon Juice
Flesh and seeds of 4 passion fruits

Method: Shake vigorously and double strain into glasses.
Glass: Sours glasses
Garnish: None

It's a "Three twist drink".
1- A twist on a sour (usually just spirit, gomme and lemon juice).
2- A twist on a Batitda (see Batida de maracuja). Batitas are made with a variety of different fruit juices, as well as coconut milk and condensed milk.
3- A twist on a passion fruit: The experience of crunching down on passion fruit seeds is much like a sour should be - The sour hit of the seeds complimented by the sweetness of the flesh. My analogy of a good sour (a really good sour, and I'm not saying this one fits that description, as it just doesn't have enough kick) is that it should slap you, apologise and then give you a kiss that leaves you wanting another sip. Those being the sour hit, the refreshing middle and the sweet curl as you swallow.

This one went down pretty well, although it could have been less sweet I think. I may try grinding up some seeds to see if they add to the kick at all.

Drink 2: Cabana Cachaca Cashew
(Recipe is also for 2 drinks and measures are still in 25ml)
3 measures Cabana Cachaca
3 measures sweetened coconut milk (2/3 coconut milk, 1/3 gomme)
1 measure Franglelico
2/3 of a cup whole cashew nuts ground to a paste.

Method: Shake the nut paste and coconut milk with some ice, to make it easier to blend. Then blend this along with everything else and strain over crushed ice.
Glass: Rocks glasses
Garnish: Cashew nuts and chocolate powder. I had been wanting to use grated hazelnut instead of chocolate, but it turns out that they are not brown inside, so asthetically wasn't as pleasing.

The inspiration for this came from a traditional way of drinking cachaca called a Caju Amigo (Friendly Cashew) (this is also mentioned on this page). The way this is done is to take a cachew nut, chew it and take a shot of cachaca. I wanted to make a drink that used this interesting flavour match. Now, there is a recipe for a Batida that uses cachew juice, and I didn't know about this at time of competition. I'll try and get my hands on some cachew juice (I've now idea how one juices a cachew - research time I think!) and see how similar it is to my drink. It's a great drink though, one of my favourites at the moment, and a really good one for a caipirinha party as it is creamy and so contrasts with the lime acidity of the caipirinhas.

Anyway, Competition was much fun and met loads of great people - I network like a maniac after a couple of drinks!

Alex
'08