Saturday, December 14, 2013

Weekend PinTest #1

Has anyone else been sucked into the vortex of Pinterest quite as much as I have?  I mean, other than the craft blog ladies.  Ya'll, I could lose hours of my life browsing that site.  A couple months ago I realized, though, that I was pinning much more than I was doing.  So now my goal is to try at least one pin from my boards every weekend.  Some weeks I attempt upwards of two or three!  I know:  my life is very exciting.  So this weekend's PinTest:  Reindeer Tracks cocktail! Click here to go to my "Been There, Done That" board on Pinterest (feel free to follow!  I love getting new Pinterest friends) and click here to see the original recipe.  (It takes you to a media cache photo of the original web page where the recipe was posted.  I tried and could not find the original on Three Olives Vodka's website.)

 
Reindeer Tracks Martini
I am such a sucker for girly froo-froo creamy chocolately beverages!  I must admit that I was a little reticent at first:  what on earth is that on the rim?!  How is this a festively fun Christmas drink with something dark and black going on?  It's cookie crumbs, ya'll.  Still not visually aesthetic for a Christmas drink, but yummy.  

So yesterday on my way home from work the hubby (we'll call him N on this blog) calls to ask me to pretty please pick up some half-and-half for him for White Russians and I thought this would be the perfect excuse for me to also pick up Oreos (for the cookie crumbs) and try this cocktail!

Here we'll digress for just a moment so I can tell you about the wonderful man in my world: N.  He's very much a man's man, very no-frills.  He has three drinks:  Jim Beam & Diet Coke (year-round), White Russians (winter), and gin & tonic (summer).  I love that steadiness and predictability in my life; I love the look on his face when I pull out a food processor and martini shaker to start experimenting.  It's a lovely look of pure horror:  "what is she doing now?!"

Back to the cocktail.  I run into the first issue at my local liquor store:  they don't carry chocolate vodka.  In any brand.  I'm looking at a WALL OF VODKA and there's no chocolate.  I can get vodka infused with hibiscus (that's not even a food, right?  flower?) but I can't get chocolate vodka.  I even ask the store employee.  Nope.  No clue what they have against it, but they don't carry it.  So I settle for what I figure is the next best:  Whipped Chocolate by Pinnacle.  The bottle says it's a mixture of whipped cream vodka and chocolate vodka.  I'm cheap and the recipe says I can use all chocolate vodka instead of a mixture of cake vodka and chocolate vodka, so I head over to Harris Teeter to get the half-and-half and Oreos.  

This is when I decide to get all the fixings for rice krispie treats too.  This is for a different PinTest that may happen in the near future, for Jim Beam Rice Whiskey Treats.  So now I'm in the checkout line with a box of Rice Krispies, a bag of mini marshmallows, a package of Oreos, and a pint of half-and-half.  This could only get better if I also had 5 boxes of Sudafed....

When I get home and start assembling the ingredients and tools I realize exactly how strong this beverage is about to be:  three different hard liquors and a splash of cream.  Nice.  Oh, and I may have made a substitution on the cream?  The recipe just says "cream" so I used the half-and-half.  But then I started thinking maybe they meant heavy cream, like for whipping?  But I already had a little infusion of whipped cream taste in my vodka, remember, so I wasn't too concerned.  

The rimming was an entirely other matter.  In my experience, water is not sticky enough to hold heavier rimmers like rock salt or crushed cookie to the rim of the martini glass.  I was pondering this problem while hanging out with my sister a week ago, and she looked at the recipe and immediately gave me the solution:  dip the rim in the cream and then in the crushed cookies.  Voila!  Worked like a charm.  The crazy bit?  CareBear (my sister) doesn't even drink.  She's just apparently a bartending savant.  

So I loved this drink and will probably add it to my repertoire.  I'm not sure if the cookie rimming will happen each time (that involved dragging out the food processor to get really finely ground crumblys) but the beverage itself was yummy.  Then when I finished it I still had a pretty martini glass mostly rimmed in cookie crumbs and I made a grasshopper in it, because Reindeer Tracks is pretty strong.  You should stop & consider before downing two in a row.  A good end to the evening.  I'm pleased with this PinTest.

Oh!  Along with looking forward to rice krispie treats with whiskey in 'em, I'll also be posting soon about another PinTest that's in progress.  But it's a Christmas gift for someone so I don't want to post and risk ruining the surprise!

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