I promised there would be cocktail recipes for the vanilla-ginger rum, and I was not a liar. I just had to take some extra time for tasting, and an even longer time because I couldn’t think of names for the cocktails, which is like the most important thing! Well, maybe not most important.

First, the cocktail:

Porcupine Racetrack

Ingredients:
2 oz vanilla-ginger rum
champagne
4-5 dashes of orange bitters

Put the rum in a glass! Top with champagne! Dash some orange bitters on there! You have yourself a drink.

And why did I call it what I did? Because I asked a friend, “What should I call this drink?” And she answered, “PORCUPINE RACETRACK,” because that is what she answers almost every question with. And the more I thought about it, the more I liked it; the drink is a little prickly and easy to drink very quickly. It is perhaps what the posh porcupine racetrack goers might consume! Also, this should be known, I am a very silly person.

Now, I promise not to name the next cocktail I come up with the “Barry and Levon”.

ANYWAY the drink.

Fire Nation

Ingredients:
2 oz. shochu
1/2 oz. lemon juice
1/2 oz. habenero-ginger infused sugar syrup (recipe follows)

Combine all ingredients into a shaker filled with ice. Shake and strain into a cocktail glass. Enjoy, breathe fire.

Habenero-Ginger Infused Sugar Syrup

2/3 cup of sugar
2/3 cup of water
1 habenero pepper, chopped roughly
3-4 inches of ginger root, peeled and sliced into rounds, then crushed (squeeze the pieces in your hand before adding them to the pot)

This recipe makes a pretty decent amount of syrup, and it’ll keep in your fridge for about 2-3 weeks. Combine all ingredients in a small saucepan, and bring to a boil. Drop the heat to medium and simmer for about 10-15 minutes. It’ll thicken up some, and take on a nice reddish-brown, caramel-y color. Turn off the heat, and fish out the larger pieces with a spoon, and then strain the smaller fibers and seeds through cheesecloth or, as I did, my ever so handy tea ball. Chill in the fridge or freezer, depending on your patience level.

This syrup is sweet and flavorful and brilliantly spicy. It’d probably be good on some other stuff! Like… I don’t know, some fruit? Maybe why not!

As for the cocktail itself, if you didn’t want to go to the trouble of infusing syrup, you could probably mimic the taste by muddling a habenero and some ginger with sugar, but this method is untested, so don’t come crying to me if it’s bad and you burned your tongue and feel bad about yourself now!

Last night I got the opportunity to not be a fool at all, thanks to David Burke at Bloomingdale’s, Inocente Tequila, and my dear friend Nicole of The NY City Dish. Nicole, through her crazy food-blogger connections (or more likely from dining at a David Burke restaurant before and filling out a comment card), got us on the list for the event: a four-course menu consisting of seven small plates, two desserts, and four cocktails, all for $42 (plus tax and tip). Obscene! Just an obscene deal, and the meal itself was ridiculous in a very good way, but this blog isn’t here to talk about food. Let me tell you about the booze that was the backbone of the event.

Inocente Tequila’s shtick is that that it’s triple-distilled, whereas most tequilas are double distilled, making for a particularly clean and smooth taste. There’s also something about a “micro-oxygenation process” and a lot of other cleverly chosen words to indicate that this is supposed to be a fancy tequila for fancy people. In any case, the event served up five variations to show off the booze:

1. Classic Margarita – Inocente tequila, lime juice, agave nectar. This one they just handed to us when we walked in the door, and continued to hand them to us until the dinner started. This was a lot smoother than I’m used to margaritas tasting, but to be perfectly honest, I am not usually drinking the classiest of margaritas. Okay, to be extra honest, if I’m drinking a margarita it’s usually frozen and came out of a pitcher. I am classy. But this was smooth and sweet, and reminded me in flavor of a caipirinha, one of my favorite drinks.

2. Double Down – Inocente tequila, cucumber puree, serrano pepper, lime juice, agave nectar. I am all about savory cocktails, especially those that involve cucumber, so I loved this one. It was fresh up front, had smooth body, and had quite a kick on the back end from the peppers. This went incredibly perfectly with the first course of ceviche and gazpacho.

3. Inocente Puro - Okay, that’s just the fancy name they gave it on the menu, but this was just a shot of the tequila straight, complete with a little glass of coffee beans and vanilla pods to cleanse the sniffing palate before sipping. Now, I don’t have much experience with blanco tequilas as sipping tequilas; my mom was into tequilas for sipping, but she mostly had añejo and reposado tequilas. This was very smooth and a little sugary on the tongue, and honestly reminded me of cachaça.

4. Pure Innocence – Inocente tequila, fresh basil, lemon juice, agave nectar, soda water. This was my absolute favorite, summery and refreshing. I’m really into basil as a cocktail ingredient right now, so having a fresh sprig right there to sniff with every sip was such a pleasure. I could have had about six of these without blinking.

5. Life’s a Peach – Inocente tequila, white peach puree, lemon juice, prosecco. This, though, was a disappointment as the last cocktail of the night. I didn’t get any taste of peach at all, just a strange bitterness and an unpleasantly heavily alcohol taste. The only good part of this cocktail was the little crispy balls of chocolate they floated in it, which I tried to be as subtle as possible (and mostly failed) at shaking all of them out of the bottom of the glass and into my mouth.

Was Inocente tequila good? Yes. It was smooth and combined well with a variety of cocktail types. Would I buy it on my own? I’m not sure, but that’s just a matter of my personal tastes. I don’t make many tequila cocktails when left to my own devices, and when it comes to liquor I’m going to be sipping, I prefer the bouquets of gin or the classic taste of brown liquors. Also, no one told me how much a bottle of this stuff costs, but I’m guessing it’s a lot. Still, it was a fantastic experience, and one I hope to repeat again next month at the similar event for Leblon Cachaça.

Now, I may be a grown woman who pretends to be a respectable adult, but this does not mean I do not have some terribly nerdy geekball hobbies and interests. I spend 85% of my life in front of a computer, I play video games constantly, I will argue with you about Star Trek, and I watch cartoons intended for a much younger demographic than the one I fit into.

What does this have to do with cocktails? Well, a while back I got myself into the really quite wonderful show Avatar: The Last Airbender. Yeah, it’s a Nickelodeon show, and the target age group is about the 8-12-year-old demographic, but really! Trust me! It’s a great show even for adults! No, stop laughing!

Mockery aside, I really enjoy the series, and when I like something, one of my first instincts is to try to see if I can come up with some sort of boozy connection for it. So for Avatar, I took the premise of the four elemental nations and tried to break them down, cocktail-style. If you’re a nerd like me and a fan of the show, you’ll see where I’m coming from with this one; if not, it’s a delicious cocktail that stands on its own.

Water Tribe

Ingredients:
2 oz. shochu
2 oz. unfiltered sake (Nigori)
1/2 oz. umeboshi sugar syrup (recipe follows) OR 1 tsp sugar + muddled umeboshi
1 pinch kosher salt
Umeboshi to garnish (optional)

The umeboshi really are the key to this drink. If you’ve never had them before, they’re sour-salty-sweet little balls of Japanese goodness, available at many Asian markets. Popping one in your mouth by itself is a recipe for puckered lips, but the complex flavor is released nicely in a drink like this.

Umeboshi Sugar Syrup

Like most infused syrups, it’s really pretty simple. You don’t need to make very large batches of this, so I’d suggest 1/2 cup of water and 1/2 cup of sugar, either heated to boiling over the stove or given a solid zap in the microwave (is that gauche, to make simple syrup in the microwave? I do not care). While the water-sugar is heating, drop in 2-3 umeboshi.  Once the sugar has dissolved into the mixture, remove the syrup from heat and let the umeboshi steep for about 10-15 minutes. After that, give them a little pop with the back of a spoon and then strain out the solids with a tea ball or your preferred method of straining.

OKAY, THE ACTUAL COCKTAIL RECIPE:

Mix all the ingredients in a shaker with ice, shake thoroughly, and strain into a chilly, chilly cocktail glass. If you don’t want to go through the trouble of making the sugar syrup, simple muddle an umeboshi and a teaspoon of sugar in the bottom of your mixer before adding the liquids. In either case, garnish with an umeboshi and enjoy this salty, sweet, ice-cold full moon of a drink. And watch some cartoons, darn ya!

If it’s not clear what I’m referring to, have a little light reading. In short, the actual Master Cleanse is a terribly unwise thing that people do to cleanse their body of alleged toxins and impurities by, as mentioned, starving themselves and pooping a lot. My professional opinion as a medical doctor is that this whole thing is a load of—to use the technical term—hooey. Sounds terribly unhealthy! Not at all like my favorite healthy activity: drinking!

I always did find the sound of mixture of maple syrup, lemon juice, and cayenne pepper to be appealing, though. It sounds like a pleasant treat, but since I’m fond of the bacteria in my intestinal tract, I never bothered to sample anything like it. That was until I bought Sortilège Maple Syrup and Whisky Liqueur. It was one of those impulse purchases in the liquor store, when you spend a while staring at the various liqueurs and going, my god! Dill liqueur? Pine eau de vie! Maple Liqueur sounded just crazy enough to work, and I bought it without really having a grand plan of what to use it in. And then I remembered the Cleanse and got to formulating.

All the refreshing flavor with none of the presumed health benefits! Behold, the Master Cleanse:

Ingredients:
2 oz Sortilège Maple Liqueur
3 oz lemonade or sparkling lemonade
several dashes cayenne pepper

Put ice in a glass, put the ingredients in that glass, stir, and serve. It’s sweet and tart and a little spicy (or a lot, depending on how heavy handed you are with cayenne). And best of all, it is absolutely, positively, not good for you at all. Unless we mean spiritually.

Verano Verde

As mentioned in my previous post about honeydew-infused rum, I had a cocktail invention in mind when I infused the rum. And that invention is this: a honeydew-basil mojito. Because I prefer cocktail names that are more poetic than descriptive, though, I gave the drink the name “Verano Verde”. It’s a beautiful green color, and tastes just like summer should.

Ingredients:
2 oz. honeydew-infused rum
1 oz lime juice (or the juice of one lime, if you don’t want to get fussy about it)
3-4 basil leaves
1 teaspoon sugar
club soda

Muddle the basil leaves and the sugar in the bottom of a glass (buying a muddler was one of the best things I’ve done; I got this nice one at Crate & Barrel, but the back of a spoon will do in a pinch). When they’re sufficently muddled, add ice, lime juice, rum, give it a stir, and top up with club soda. If you’re feeling fancy, you could garnish with a piece of honeydew; I just put frozen pieces of the rum-soaked honeydew from the infusion in my guests’ glasses.

The drink is fresh, green, refreshing and clean. Lovely for a hot summer night.

Pour over ice:

2 oz light rum
1 oz sugar syrup (optional)

Top up with Aranciata.

In a shaker full of ice, combine:

2 oz. light rum
3/4 oz. lemon juice
1/2 oz. sugar syrup

Shake, pour into a glass with ice. Top up with club soda.

Before you drink, please sing:

I’m a shaaaaaark!!!!!
I’m a shaaaaaaaaaark!
Suck my diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiick!
I’m a SHAAAAAAAAAARK!

Angel’s Hope

Ingredients
1 part gin
1 part calvados
1 part orange liqueur

For this drink, I used Hendrick’s Gin, Christian Drouain Calvados, and Grand Marnier. In an earlier incarnation I also tried a cheaper triple sec, and found it somewhat cheapened the overall drink. It’s entirely true: quality components make for a quality cocktail.

In a shaker filled with ice, combine all ingredients. Shake well, then strain into a cocktail glass. Enjoy! This drink is a lovely balance of spicy and sweet, and with Hendrick’s in particular, has a wonderful floral undernote.