Tagged with gin

Aviation

This drink was first featured in An Edible Flower Picnic, with other dishes using edible flowers provided by Marx Foods.

Flow­ers go extremely well with this crisp, flo­ral, and refreshing cock­tail. This drink is easy to make with only a few ingredients, and it seems to be great in the win­ter or the spring!

A little about The Aviation — it is one of the last great cocktails created before Prohibition, having been invented just a few years before the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment. It made its first appearance in print in 1916 in Recipes for Mixed Drinks by Hugo Ensslin, who bartended at the Hotel Wallick gin Times Square near 43rd and Broadway.

NYE Cocktail Tasting Menu

cocktails

As we get older, we find ourselves more reluctant to go out on holidays. New Year’s, Valentine’s… we’d just rather stay home. This past New Year’s Eve we spoiled ourselves with some Bon Chon Korean Fried Chicken while watching the original Home Alone. With frequent pausing to whip up these drinks of course!

The collage above is hot-linked to the respective cocktail recipes. Or, you can see the full tasting menu, with individual photos below.

We ended the night with a bottle of sparkling wine and watching the ball drop on CNN with Anderson Cooper and the always awkward Kathy Griffin.

10888881_10101861327571436_7797182702232115997_nAnd of course, a traditional selfie with our awesome cat, Leopold. It is a tad ironic that I’m a bit late in posting this — so late that it’s actually the Lunar New Year’s Eve!

Absinthe Suissesse Spiked Nog Gin-Gin-Gin Mule Ume Sour Bananary Buzz Apricot Winter Monk's Hot Chocolate

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Quadruple Strawberry Cupcakes

These cupcakes have four different types of strawberry in them – Strawberry Cake, Strawberry Lime Gin Compote Filling, Strawberry Cream Cheese Frosting, and a Chocolate-dipped Strawberry on top. Needless to say, my strawberry-allergic-sister got no where close to these. I made these cupcakes for a surprise baby shower that we threw for a co-worker. The cake was very moist, maybe even a little too moist, but I’ll attribute that to the liquid-y filling. I actually made these the night before and for once, a swiss meringue frosting turned out! Unfortunately, I chilled it overnight and it separated. No amount of beating or adding of powders could solidify it again. I took the remaining strawberry gin compote and tossed it a traditional cream cheese frosting which tasted just as good.

These cupcake liners are Martha Stewart. I splurged on a bunch of them because they were on sale at a local craft store. I wish I would have tried the liners before buying so many – these are not worth it! You would think that Martha Stewart products for the price would be good quality, but these liners are equal or less quality than grocery store brands for about 6x the cost! This is a light, yellow cake with a dark purple and white liner and you can barely see the pattern. *sigh* I might be able to salvage them by baking a pastel muffin liner inside them, but I don’t know if it’d be worth it.