Sam and I will probably not be having a proper date night out for a few months yet, due to his new job and a small baby, not to mention a toddler! However the toddler goes to bed at bang on seven and stays there for 12 hours and the baby is now starting to allow us to put him down for sleep rather than be sleeping on us, so we are designating a night a week for ‘indoor date night’. Limited social media (neither of us can go cold turkey!) a proper meal and sometimes a drink or two!
Last Friday Nights ‘indoor date night’ was made awesome because the lovely people at TheBar.com sent us a bottle of vodka and some jam jars so we could get our cocktail on! Well, I say we but I leave all cocktail making firmly up to Sam! He knows what he’s doing as he used to design cocktails for functions at The Grand when he worked there! Although saying that I reckon I could have mixed this one up fairly easily, and it helps that we have a cocktail shaker, jiggers, a muddler and a bar spoon in our kitchen already! The Bar.com have super easy to follow instructions and it also tells you how many units of alcohol are in of each drink, and you can change the number of servings you need to make to get the correct measurements. You can decide on what to make by choosing a spirit, or for a specific occasion and all the recipes have a bit of history about them too!
I chose a Raspberry Caprioska for our main cocktail of the night, and if you wanted to make it too here’s how:
You need:
- 80ml.
Smirnoff No. 21® Vodka
- 8wedge(s)
Lime
- 10piece(s)
Raspberries
- 2tbsp
Brown Sugar
- 24ml.
Sugar Syrup (we made our own!)
To make:
- Cut lime wedges. Using a sharp knife and a chopping board, cut a lime into quarters.
- Add lime wedges, raspberries, brown sugar and sugar syrup to a glass. Place 4 lime wedges, 5 raspberries and a tablespoon of brown sugar in a tumbler. Using a jigger, measure 12.5ml sugar syrup into the tumbler.
- Muddle the ingredients. Press down on the contents of the glass using a muddler to extract juices and flavour.
- Add crushed ice and pour in Smirnoff No.21. Top with crushed ice and, using a jigger, measure 40ml Smirnoff No.21 into the glass.
- Stir thoroughly. Using a barspoon, stir the mixture until the ingredients are well combined.
- Add crushed ice.
Sam whipped them up in a couple of minutes, whilst I dished up our duck and noodles. The Caprioskas were thoroughly enjoyable, so enjoyable we had two each in fact! Hopefully we’ll be able to have friends round soon and wow them with our (okay, Sam’s) cocktail making skills! It’s definitely more fun than cracking open a few cans of cider, and my head hurts a lot less after a couple of cocktails too.. although judging by the photo Sam took we both look blurry-tipsy!
If you fancy your hand a at cocktail making then share snaps of your efforts on social media using #LetsCocktail for a chance to win some amazing prizes, more details can be found here.
This post is in partnership with TheBar.com. Please drink sensibly!