Given my love of Aggie, cocktails and puns was there ever a world where I was not going to make a Murder on The Orient Espresso Martini? And yes, in my head I call her Aggie. I am sure Dame Agatha is turning in her grave at the thought! But, once I started I could not stop! Just like you might not be able to stop at just one of these delicious Espresso Martinis!
I have always been a bit wary of an Espresso Martini as I thought the caffeine would keep me awake. Also, the last coffee flavoured cocktail I made was from Cantina and was disgusting. It convinced me that I did not like coffee flavoured cocktails. I now think that the awfulness of that cocktail was probably more due to the many problems with that book rather than an aversion to coffee cocktails per se. I really enjoyed the Espresso Martini!!! Drinking it felt very luxuriant and sophisticated which ties in nicely with the glamour and opulence of the Orient Express.
Poirot might have sipped one instead of the luminous green cocktail he drinks in the film had they been invented back then!
Express Martini History
London bartender Dick Bradsell created the Espresso Martini in the 1980s. He mixed it up for a young model who asked him for something to “wake me up and f**k me up” Rumour has it that the model was Kate Moss but this is unconfirmed!
It would however dovetail very nicely into my narrative as Kate Moss famously dated Johnny Depp in the 1990s. And he played Ratchett in the Kenneth Brannagh version of Murder on the Orient Express!
This brings us back to doh-oh-oh!
(Don’tcha love it when something works out so neatly!)
Espresso Martini – The Recipe
I used the recipe from 365 Days of Cocktails by Difford’s Guide. The recipe on their website has a very intriguing sounding dash of salt solution in it which I really want to try!
Here’s the recipe I used:
via 365 Days of Cocktails
The November book if you are reading along will be “Three Act Tragedy” which was actually written before Murder on the Orient Express but which I skipped in order to do the collab with Jenny. Whilst it is not as well known as Murder it is a cracker of a read and unlike a few recent books is jammed full of food references.
I had such high hopes for this post. Then they were totally dashed by a twist of fate that…well…I guess if I’d seen it coming it wouldn’t be a twist would it? But I’m jumping ahead of myself. First, I was totally delighted when Greg from Recipes4Rebels asked if I would join in a cookalong for Cowboy Day! This event occurs on the fourth Saturday of July each year and is celebrated all over the world!
Obviously, this is not the fourth Saturday in July, however, as I will be sunning myself on the beach at Sanur in Bali that day, with Greg’s blessing I am posting my ventures into Cowboy Cookin’ early! And it’s a three course meal y’all. (Because 1 that’s how cowboy’s talk and 2 cocktails are a course aren’t they? This one is almost a meal! But again, getting ahead of myself!)
So now onto my foiled grand plans. My idea was that I would find a cocktail called a Bali Cowboy – possibly a more tropical version of this cowboy cocktail and I would make it for my post and then, on the day itself, I would tweet another picture of me in Bali with with my Bali Cowboy and it would in a glass as big as my head and it would be blue and loaded with umbrellas and pineapple wedges and all the other tropical cocktail paraphenalia.
A quick google soon showed me that there is such a thing as a Bali Cowboy. It is NOT a cocktail. Turns out that a Bali Cowboy is a male prostitute who hangs around Kuta Beach willing to sell his services to any rich (ie all) Western women who care to pay for them. So, whilst I’m not 100% ruling out a photo of me with a Bali Cowboy on Cowboy Day, the likelihood of it happening has dropped significantly!
So, new ideas had to be found. Starting with some caviar. Because we’re classy cowboys! It’s Cowboy Caviar of courseWhere has this salad / dip been all my life? If this is what cowboys eat, then I want to be a cowboy. It’s all kinds of beans and corn and tomatoes and avocado . Truly delicious! I loved this!
So, for the second course, I went straight to the top. And by that I mean Mr John Wayne himself.
Turns out The Duke and I share a love of eggs, cheese and chillies. Now, just one thing about the John Wayne casserole…. To my mind, when you combine egg yolks to beaten egg whites with other stuff, in this instance cheese and chilli and you them put that in an oven and cook until it’s all puffed up and golden, that’s not so much a casserole as a soufflé.
You be the judge:
I’ll sit quietly over here and let my case speak for itself.
By the way, cooking this for an hour would be way too much. You are seeing about 35 minutes and I think it was over. I would cook this…half an hour max. Also, the tomato didn’t do much. I would actually leave it out and cook this for 20 minutes total.
The soufflé casserole was good but I think I was so blown away by the Cowboy Caviar that it kind of paled by comparison. I will definitely make it again though!
And now for my grand Cowboy finale, I am turning to to person who started all of this, yep, Greg. This cocktail /dessert is A-MAZING! So, so good. Cowboys and cowgirls, can I present, the Giant Martini!
There is no other word for this but absolutely divine! The giant in the Giant Martini doesn’t refer t to it’s size (but you could scale it up very easily) but to the fact that it was created on the set of Giant by Liz Taylor and Rock Hudson.
Git along little doggie, this cocktail is all mine!
And you too!
Ah yes, Greg’s site on the PC, a cocktail in front of me and The A-Z of Cooking behind it. Just a regular day round these parts!
Many, many thanks to Greg, this was so much fun! Thank you so much for including me! I always say this but you hear so much about the internet being a a horrible vicious place, I am always delighted and totally honoured to make new friends, like Greg, on here.
Ok, I’ve gotta go, 5:30am start tomorrow! But I’m loving and leaving you with some some super rhinestone cowboy singing!
Find out all about the Cowboy Day Cook A Long here. Hopefully my attempts will inspire you to bigger and better things on the day!
Kiss me and smile for me, I’ll be back here in a couple of weeks but if you can’t smile without me, I’ll be tweeting and instagramming from Bali throughout.
