Sparkling Strawberry Champagne

Valentines Day is officially here and gone! While I will be posting about the party itself later this week I thought I would start with the delicious cocktail we all enjoyed with our tea! I wanted something a little pink, a little red, and not too sweet to go with our breakfast, and this cocktail hit the spot!

Note: This post contains affiliate links, which means that if you click one of the links and choose to purchase, I will receive a small commission. This does not affect your price in any way and I only promote products I use and love!

Ingredients :

Citrus Vodka
1 Bottle of Prosecco, chilled
Sparkling Grapefruit Juice, chilled
Grenadine
1 Package Strawberries
Pink Cocktail Sugar or edible glitter

1. Clean and cut strawberries. My strawberries were simply quartered, but you could cut a couple heart shaped for garnish.

2. In each glass combine 1/2 oz. Citrus Vodka, 1 tsp Grenadine and Strawberries. Cover and put in fridge until ready to serve. 

3. just before serving, add both the prosecco and grapefruit juice to the vodka mixture. Start by adding the prosecco until 2/3 full then top with the grapefruit juice. Serve in sugar rimmed glasses with a strawberry for garnish.

I also added a little edible glitter into the bottom of each glass before serving to give a little more sparkle to this sparkling drink! Cheers and Happy Valentines day!

Summer Sangria Bar

It has become a sort of tradition that at every fourth of July party I have, the drink of choice is always sangria. I absolutely love the stuff and it is a signature drink that you can be sure no one will turn their nose up at. This year I displayed mine differently than in the past with the sangria "bases" accompanied by their wine soaked fruit.

While it would have been prettier to keep all the fruit in my pretty serving jars I tried that at my first Fourth of July Party with frustrating results for all. About halfway through each sangria, the fruit and pulp all settled at the bottom, clogging the spouts and making them useless! Plus anyone who actually wanted fruit in their sangria (so everyone but me) had to fish it out with a ladle, not exactly what I was going for. :) Then to add insult to injury it took HOURS to clean the servers out because of all the pulp in the spouts!

But now the question becomes how do we flavor the sangria wine and still collect all the fruit? I used one of my favorite cooking items that few people use nowadays, cheesecloth! It had the perfect balance of letting the fruit soak in the wine as intended but giving me an easier way of getting it all out for friends!

Each fruit for the sangrias I had washed and cut up the night before and that was the best choice I could have made, this process takes a good chunk of time if you are making multiple sangrias!

I cut a square of cheesecloth (You can get it and baker's twine in the cooking tools section of your local grocery store) and folded it out entirely, single ply for those of you who have used cheese cloth. Pile in all your fruit, one type per cloth, and gather all the edges together to create a little bundle of fruit. Tie  the ends together using bakers twine and layer each bundle in your serving container. Make sure that you have some room in your bundles for the fruit to move around!  I did a lot of squishing and squeezing to get my bundles into the glass jars so extra space makes the process so much easier!

Have faith in your cheesecloth, at its thinnest it really doesn't look like it will stay together and not just rip apart but I only had one blow out of all my cheesecloth "bundles" and I had to be pretty violent to squeeze them all into my sangria servers (notice how small the top is? yeah it was a process).

Once all the fruit bundles were in the servers I added the rest of the ingredients, starting with the additional liquor and sugar in each recipe, then the wine. A couple of my recipes required sparkling cider and water, but I waited until I took out the fruit to add those, fruit takes up a lot of room and I didn't want to lose the bubbles! I loaded all three of my sangrias into the fridge and let them sit for 8 hours.

Once they were ready the fun task of removing the fruit started. I wish there was a better way to do this but honestly the easiest way to get them out is to wash your hands (and forearms) and take each of them out by hand. I had a mixing bowl at the ready for each sangria to hold the bundles which was great for two reasons. First, it held all the fruit so I could refill the little bowls as needed. But better than that it gave me an easy place to deposit fruit that had to be collected from opened bundles. While I was able to get out the majority of the bundles intact, a few were just too fat to come out as they came in. Thus I ripped open a hole in the bag and scooped out about half of the fruit, then it was just able to get through.

Finally I added any extra wine that would fit with the fruit, the bubbly stuff and they were ready to go! The result were far better than last time and so much easier to clean up! Leave any questions in the comments, cheers!

All That Glitters: Sparkling Cocktail Sugar

As promised in the last post, here are the steps I took to make the glitter sugar rim for the Kinky Lemon Drops. I originally planned on just rimming the glasses in glitter, but after tasting the glitter (and enduring a glittery tongue for a couple hours) I found that the glitter itself is tasteless. To me that took away one of the best parts of the lemon drop, a sweet sugary rim with a cold tart cocktail! 

To start I took some of the rose pink cake dye I already owned and dyed about 1 cup of sugar. To dye sugar your best bet is to get a gel based food coloring, which you can find in the cake section of your local craft store. Gel based food coloring won't dissolve and causes far fewer sugar clumps than liquid food coloring does and will give a much more vibrant color. I always use a mini whisk to make colored sugars but any small whisk should do the trick. Start with about a 1/4 tsp. of food coloring (I just dipped my clean whisk in the dye) and whisk into the sugar until the color is fully incorporated. Continue to add food coloring until you reach your desired color; however, if you are using the "whisk dip" method like me, make sure to clean your whisk before every dip. You don't wan't sugar or other contaminants getting into your dye! Don't be discouraged by how long you have to whisk in sugar, it takes a while but the result is beautiful!

Start of the whisking through adding the glitter.

While sugar is still slightly damp from the dye, whisk in the edible glitter. The gel dye will help it cling to the sugar and not just sift to the bottom. I ended up using about half a jar of glitter for a cup and a half of sugar and it turned out perfect!

And there you have it! A magical batch of sugar for your next cocktail party! I usually just store mine in a mason jar but any method you use to store sugar will do. If you have questions, leave them in the comments!

The Kinky Lemon Drop

Every new venture should start with a toast and the start of this blog is no different! 

The Lemon Drop is by far my favorite cocktail so reinventing it in a new (pinker) way seemed just the thing to kick this party off! The biggest challenge in creating this cocktail was the proportions of Kinky Liquor and Vodka, enough Kinky to make it a beautiful shade of pink but not so much that you lost the tartness of a traditional lemon drop.

Once I got the perfect combination, it just needed a little more pizazz so what better way than a girl's best friend, glitter! Rimming the Glass and adding a dash of edible Disco Glitter gave it just the sparkle it needed to be a truly memorable drink for any occasion.  The sugar glitter rim ended up being a little more involved than I originally thought so you will be able to see in detail how to make that in the next blog post!

Recipe:

2 oz. Kinky Liquor
1/2 oz Limoncello
1 oz Citrus Vodka
Disco Glitter for  Cocktail
Pink Sugar Glitter for rim

1. Rim the glasses with the pink sugar glitter mix by lining the glass edge with lemon juice or water and dipping it in sugar on a plate.
2. Add Kinky, Limoncello, and Vodka to a Cocktail shaker. Shake until thoroughly combined
3. Add to rimmed glass and sprinkle the top of the drink with additional glitter, enjoy!

Note: Glitter does tend to settle to the bottom and top of the glass so having stir sticks with each glass is helpful so that guests can keep their glitter "moving" around in their glasses.