People of the world, meet my new favourite drink! Forget the Aperol Spritz, the Aperol Gin and Tonic is a great drink for summer drinking, or really for any time of the year.
I love G&T’s and Negroni’s and the Aperol Gin and Tonic is kind of a cross between them. Or, as I like to call it, win-win.
The Aperol Gin and Tonic is slightly sweet, slightly bitter, has great citrus flavour and a lovely complexity from the botanicals in the gin. All of which is a fancy way of saying “It’s delicious…drink up!”
It’s also a very pretty drink!
Even though this is called the Aperol Gin and Tonic, there is a surprise ingredient in here which I think rounds out the flavours, ramps up the orange and adds the sweetness….
Yep! Cointreau. Which I am also partial too! If you wanted to take the Negroni-ness of this up to 11, you could, of course, sub out the Cointreau for some vermouth!
I found the recipe for the Aperol Gin and Tonic in a Waitrose magazine when I was in England earlier this year. Made it and then promptly lost the recipe. Luckily it was not hard to remember!
So, just this last week I sent off my passport for a visa for a place where the flag looks kind of like this!
Need a few more hints?
Yep, if they approve my visa, I’m off to Russia in August!
I’m so excited! I’ve been watching as much of the World Cup as I can – not so much for the football but for the travel stories and the scenery.
I’ll be visiting Moscow:
And St Petersburg:
But back to the cocktail. I am both obsessed by and fascinated with the pousse-cafe style cocktail where various liqueurs are layered over each other. They always look so pretty. This recipe was called The Electric Flag and I had to include the original version of it here because it so quirky. (Doh! I can’t remember where on earth this recipe came from either!
Yep, this little drink here is 150% cocktail!
I used kirsch instead of grappa for my version. I also didn’t knock it back in one but sipped it over the course of the evening. It’s strong! If you are also sipping, make sure you mix it well before you do.
Otherwise, it’s all alcohol at the start and plain sickly sweet grenadine at the end. The mix of the three together is lovely though!
I’m going to be spending the next few weeks delving into some Russian literature – starting with one of my favourites.
I’ll follow this classic with a wonderful piece of fantasy by dipping back into the Night Watch Series by Sergei Lukyanenko…this is an AMAZING series with Russian Vampires. The first book was also made into a crazy good film a few years ago. The sixth instalment of this series came out last year but I am going to save that for when I am in situ. Meantime, I’ll reimmerse myself into this world by re-reading the earlier books.
Have a great week? Are you watching the World Cup? Who do you think will win?
Back in my school days, we had an annual music competition where each House had to arrange and sing a song of their choice to assorted judges, family, staff and fellow schoolmates.
One year the song selected by my House Music Captain for all of us to sing started like this:
Bonnie and Clyde were pretty lookin’ people,
But I can tell you people,
They were the devil’s children.
I had no idea who Bonnie and Clyde before then but wow! Believe me, just those opening lines were enough to send me racing to the Encyclopedia Britannica for more! Pretty people? Of course I wanted to know more. Pretty people who were also evil? My 14-year-old mind was blown. Who knew such a thing even existed!
Why am I telling you all this?
Because a little while ago the lovely Jenny from Silver Screen Suppers asked if I would test out a cocktail recipe for her upcoming cookbook. The cocktail was the Faye Dunaway cocktail, and Faye played Bonnie Parker in the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde.
And oh boy, you want to talk about pretty looking people?
Oh, the glamour!!!!
The Faye Dunaway Cocktail is also pretty glam! It was invented in 2011 by Jonathan Humphrey of the Drake Hotel in Toronto and was inspired by the film Chinatown, which stars Faye Dunaway and Jack Nicholson.
The recipe for the Faye Dunaway cocktail calls for mango juice which I was unable to find. I also do not have a juicer so I puréed a fresh mango. I was a little worried because the mango purée was quite thick but it worked out perfectly. So do not despair if you also cannot find juice. If fresh mango is unavailable frozen would also work perfectly!
The Faye cocktail perfectly balances sweet, spicy and sour flavours in a glorious mix of mango, lime and chilli. It’s sooooo good! I loved it – it reminded me of sunshine and holidays and tropical climes! I made this exactly as per the recipe (which you can find here) because I was testing the recipe for Jenny. However, even though this is divine as is, I can’t help wondering what it might be like if you also brought in a salty element by edging the glass? Salty, sweet hot and sour being the four elements Thai cooks try to bring into balance. Because that is really what the flavours of this cocktail reminded me of…cocktails on a beach in Thailand.
Faye’s birthday is coming up on January 14. I was going to hold off posting this until the day itself. Then I thought it would be much more fun to give you all a chance to buy the ingredients so we could all celebrate her gorgeousness and iconic fashion sense by donning a beret and drinking one of these in her honour!
I will be trying the Salty Faye myself but if anyone makes either version, please let me know what you think!
And speaking of iconic fashion…I had so much fun trying to find the Dinah Shore look a few weeks ago that I thought I would give it another go.
Here is my take on Faye’s Bonnie and Clyde look fashion via my very first post on Polyvore. Because don’t we all need a little bad girl glam every now and again?
Oh, and for anyone who is wondering how our music competition turned out?
The judges said that our singing and arrangement were spot on but that the content was inappropriate for both us to be singing and our audience to be listening to!
If you would like to hear the scurrilous lyrics not fit for the mouths of good God-fearin’ girls (and see some photos of the real Bonnie and Clyde) here’s a YouTube of that song:
Many thanks to Jenny for the opportunity to help with her book (I will let you all know when it is ready to be purchased, it’s going to be awesome!) and for selecting such a fabulous recipe for me to try!
So, I made this Flamingo cocktail today with the idea that I would post it in the usual time it takes me to post anything – a month, six weeks, some time in the yet to be disclosed future. But then I opened my email and discovered that today, December 26 in the way back of 1946 was the day that Bugsy Siegel opened the Pink Flamingo Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas Nevada.
I’m not a big fan of posting too quickly because I like to procrastinate carefully curate what goes into these pages.
It’s why the quality is usually so high…😂
But some opportunities are too good to miss.
And how pretty is this? It’s a gorgeous, glorious, fabulous pink! Perfect for drinking at the most fabulous, magnificent , luxurious resort in the world….or just, you know, at home…
Siegel, called “the mobster with the beautiful blue eyes” by Cesar Romero named the resort the Flamingo after his girlfriend Virginia Hill who was a leggy redhead.
The opening of the Pink Flamingo Casino was a total clusterf**k. Bad weather kept many of the Hollywood celebrities who had been invited to the opening away. The rooms weren’t finished so gamblers took their winnings elsewhere. By the end of the first week, the Pink Flamingo had lost $300,000 in revenue. By the end of its first year of operation it had earned nothing!
Siegel was shot to death in 1947.
A memorial to him still exists in the current Flamingo complex.
Far from being a clusterf**k, the Flamingo cocktail is a total delight!
Gin, Apricot Brandy, lime juice and Grenadine make it delicious!
A maraschino cherry gives it some vintage glamour. It’s not in the recipe but it does make it gorgeous!
The Sherry Cobbler is an American cocktail probably first made in the 1830’s. It was hugely popular in its native land but was, also incredibly popular in Melbourne during the Gold rush years, between 1851 and through to the end of the 1860’s . Gold brought both a vast increase in the population and in the wealth of the population. And where there are miners and money? There will be booze.
Nowadays, sherry is seen as an old lady’s drink. However, this was not always the case. Back in the 1960’s all the cool kids were drinking it.
And 100 years before them it was the turn of these boys.
Dry Sack sounds more like a painful affliction than something I would want to drink so I used a Fino Sherry for my Cobbler but you can use but you can use whatever you have. The Sherry Cobbler consists of Sherry, sugar, fruit and a little sprinkle of nutmeg.
Now, I can quite easily imagine our 1960’s poolside pleasure seekers enjoying a Sherry Cobbler or two. But the miners? Surely not. Least of all because you would think all the fruit would get stuck in their beards. But apparently back in the 1850’s it was the most popular mixed drink in the world.
However, those miners were pretty wily. Is it a pure coincidence that the Sherry Cobbler, according to this article, was the drink that popularised the use of the straw. Or was it just a solution to fruit in beard syndrome?
But right from the start I promised you crazy and miners sipping sherry through straws is not crazy. It’s adorable but not crazy.
So let’s get crazy. The Sherry Cobbler is poured over crushed ice. Except back in the day there was no ice in Melbourne. We are a temperate climate and Melbourne’s first iceplant didn’t open until 1860. But dammit if those miners didn’t want their Sherry Cobblers served as the Good Lord intended them. So, ice was imported from America. Specifically, huge ice cubes were cut from the frozen lakes in Massachusetts, packed in sawdust and shipped to Melbourne to satisfy the Sherry Cobbler yearnings of the miners.
Not crazy enough? In a land where there was no ice, how common do you think those new fangled devices called straws were? Pretty damn non-existent apparently. So how did those quick witted miners get around that little dilemma?
They used pieces of macaroni as straws.
Yep. For real.
For serious.
Macaroni.
Can you imagine anything more delightful than the five gentlemen above out on a night on the tiles sipping their Sherry Cobblers through macaroni straws?
The Sherry Cobbler is a lovely tipple too. It would be a great day drink as it’s not too boozy. And certainly not a drink just for your maiden aunt
Ditch the macaroni straw though. It was useless.
[yumprint-recipe id=’101′]Unless otherwise indicated, all the facts in the above about Melbourne, ice, straws and macaroni come from a wonderful book called Flavours of Melbourne by Charmaine O’Brien (Wakefield Press, 2008). This book is awesome. There will be more recipes from it for sure.
Any errors or omissions and all the hyperbole are mine alone.
