Cocktail Party

I had the honor to co-host a cocktail party up in the Penthouse with the lovely Aimee this past weekend.  A "Dress to Impress" event, everyone showed up in their finest.  And yes, there was a guy in a bowtie.  Win. 


We decided to serve five cocktails and four slushes to ease the bartending duties, and what a great decision.  It was so nice to have half of the cocktails made already, in the freezer, ready to go!  And even better, we learned a great heat transfer lesson...putting frozen drinks in a cooler with ice and water results in instant freezing cold icy coozies.  Oops.  Thank goodness we only put half out and kept the other half in the freezer...

All smiles.  No other pictures, though...sadly, I forgot to charge my camera battery, and I was busy pouring drinks!

But the week before, because we're cool kids, we had a photoshoot!  And then a wonderful Saturday night drinking all of our practice rounds, obviously.  We actually used the photos in our menu to describe the ingredients in each drink.  While I'm able to do macro shots on a white background fairly well (what is now being described as gooseberry porn) --- getting an area designed for shooting larger things just hasn't gone well.  These are all taken with Ikea linen tablecloths behind them, and as you see, un-ironed tablecloths. Oh well.  There is a reason I'm not a food blogger.

St. Germain and Champagne - sweet, bubbly, addictive.  

We got the recipe for Drink's Aviation from bartender Will Thompson himself:

1/4 oz creme de violette
1/4 oz Luxardo maraschino liqueur 
2 oz london dry gin  (Beefeater, Gordon's, Citadelle; the middle 80% of gins as far as juniperness goes)
1/2 oz freshly squeezed lemon juice

Mix all together in a shaker and strain into chilled coupe.

Grapefruit Thyme Spritzer - god bless Martha Stewart.  And the black pepper...?  Amazing.

Mint Julep -instead of muddling, you add mint directly to the whiskey and let it extract for a couple of hours.  Add a glass full of chilled ice and mint simple syrup, and you are set for a wonderful julep. 

We also did a rosemary gin spritzer, but we didn't end up making it til the party---however, it turned out great!  And if anyone's curious, we had 26 people over, and food plus alcohol was $300.  We asked for donations, and ended up only $20 short, which was fabulous.  So, very economically smart, and people left happy and just a bit tipsy. 

I'm going to keep the recipes of the slush drinks a bit under wraps, since I sent them off to Serious Eats to be tested for inclusion in a summer slush drink feature.  I did offer to treat the always hilarious Drinking the Bottom Shelf blogger Will Gordon to my slushes, but they prefer to do in house testing.  But--if that falls through, I'll post the recipes here. 

Hurricane

Watermelon Mint Vodka

 Blackberry Sage Gin

Saturn