S#91: Signature Cocktail

“Pull all the liquor bottles out of your cabinet and line them up on the bench. Now, go to the fridge and pull out all the liquids and fruits. Do the same with the pantry. Now, line up all your shot glasses and start mixing! You’re searching for the perfect signature cocktail. This involves lots of taste-testing. Be daring, be crazy. Give your drinks a wacky name.” -steffmetal.com

Here’s what I found:

Alcohol: Cask cooking wine (red), butterscotch schnapps, blue curacao, and a rather strong ginger dessert wine.

Mixers: Milk, lemonade, diet coke.

Good ideas: Lemon juice, vanilla essence, honey, cinnamon, nutmeg.

Bad ideas: Custard powder, sweet soy sauce, glucose syrup, 3/4 dodgy banana from several days ago.

I screwed my courage to the sticking-place and started with the red wine – mostly because I don’t like it.

Step one: Taste wine. Result: Still don’t like it.

Step two: Add butterscotch schnapps. Result: instant stomach cramps.

Pause.

Step three: Add lemon juice. Result: Coughing, sticking out of tongue as if to scrape off the taste.

Pause.

Step four: Carefully heat glucose syrup (the stickiest substance known to man) in a small dish until it’s actually a liquid.

Pause.

Sigh.

Step five: Realise putting glucose syrup in the delicate wine glass will almost certainly result in destruction (or glucose highlights to every future drink from that glass). Instead, as the glucose re-thickens (highly reminiscent of the Terminator, fyi), pour the wine over it and mix as well as can be hoped.

Sigh. Roll eyes. Wrap the resulting mixture around the end of a spoon and eat it.

Result: Very like a sour lolly with 90% of the flavour surgically removed.

Conclusion: I don’t drink. . . wine.

Name of creation: Savignon Blerg.

After a brief recovery period, I moved on and blended together the banana, milk, custard powder, and more schnapps – with a sprinkling of nutmeg on top. It was like drinking a banana milkshake, eating a butterscotch lolly, and enjoying a flour-top bun, all in one harmonious mouthful (it’s the raw custard powder that gives it the sense of a flour-top bun).

Conclusion: This was a win.

Name: Naughty Picnic.

I moved on to my next adventure, which I’d already named “Black and Blue”. See what I mean?

Step one: Try some blue curacao. Result: It tastes of blue. Like really, REALLY blue. Sweet and fake as a girl you pay to be your friend.

Step two: Feeling tender, you add vanilla next. Vanilla goes with everything, right? Result: Wrong. So very wrong. One extra iota of sweetness was more than Miss Blue could handle. I like sugar, really I do, but this tasted like sugar after it had been thrown up for being too sugary.

Step three: Hastily add coke. Coke will make it better. It has to. Result: It did. Who knew? Coke – especially diet coke – has such powers of disgustingness that it can absorb almost anything. Bizarelly, I think it tasted better with blue curacao and vanilla essence in it, as if they filled in the blanks taken out when it became a diet drink. Odd.

Ah, if only the tale ended here.

Step four: Add sweet soy sauce. Result: The drink suddenly has a meatiness to it, as if it wasn’t quite solid before. The soy sauce, while adding to the cloying sweetness, gives the drink a dark and brooding presence, much like Sauron’s enormous burning eye in Mordor. . . watching. Waiting. Killing.

In this metaphor, the vanilla essence represents the friendship of the fellowship (the one small good thing), the blue curacao represents the false/fragile goodness of the parts of Middle Earth where the killing hasn’t started yet, and the diet coke represents Sauron’s power – omnipresent, all-consuming, and Just Not Right.

Finally, I moved on to arguably the riskiest endeavour of the night: the ginger wine.

Step one: Gird loids.

Step two: Taste ginger wine.

Step three: Feel manly for not coughing this time. Congratulate self. Wish CJ had been in the room to see.

Move on.

Step four: Heat honey in microwave until it’s very runny. Mix with the ginger wine. Result: Just like that, the sucker punch of the ginger wine appears to be neutralised. It’s more like those lemon and honey concoctions grandma made when you had a cold. Realise you put in too much honey. Move on.

Step five: Add lemonade. Result:

Pause.

Step six: Sip it again. And again. And a bigger sip.

Pause.

Smile.

The darn thing’s delicious! It’s like ginger beer! The experiment has yielded a positive result!

Yay for ginger winebeer. I have a friend called Lee, so I named it Ginger Lee in her honour.

Step seven: Sprinkle cinnamon on top. Result: Meh. Better without, but it’s still delicious.

Step eight: Call CJ. Smile ominously as he tries everything. Smile proudly as he enjoys the Naughty Picnic and Ginger Lee.

Conclusion: Win and win.

I apologised for putting too much honey in the Ginger Lee.

“It IS like ginger beer,” he said happily. “Made by bees.”

I put more wine and lemonade in it, and he drank some more, but said he really liked the honeyer version. Then he discovered more honey in the bottom of the glass.

In more ominous news, I saw “Predators” last night (I say “saw” – in reality I watched perhaps half of it, and had whispered conversations with CJ about what was going on the rest of the time). It was quite stressful, and I was quietly impressed.

Then I came home, and it was night, and I had to take the rubbish out.

I moved the wheelie bin near our front door for easy access, glad that we recently replaced the sensor light out the front.

I went and gathered all the rubbish.

I opened the front door – and RIGHT THERE BEFORE ME was an animal face looking at me from pure darkness; pure black pupils and white fur and silence.

Darn cat sat on the darn wheelie bin waiting for me until the darn sensor light turned itself off. (But WHY?!?!)

And with that thought, here’s today’s killer robot, and yes it really is from geekologie.com (a site I now love – go look at them and you’ll see why):