These homemade liqueurs and infused alcohols make covetable holiday gifts.

Keep the cold out this fall with a classic Old Fashioned cocktail, kissed with a hint of maple.

Source: Nigella Lawson's How to Be a Domestic Goddess Changes I've made include:  Reducing the brown sugar from 1 2/3 cups to 1 1/2 cups. I find dark or light works just fine.  Replacing the water with coffee and booze. I use my Nespresso machine to make espresso, which I add water to to make 1 cup. If you don't feel like adding booze or coffee, simply use 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons boiling water instead. Upped the vanilla. Added salt.

I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me. – Winston Churchill In honour of the new pope – liqueur made from coconut. Dressed in white from head to toe. (Was I just sacrilegious?) I’ve been lazy. I haven’t posted a homemade booze for all my dipsomaniac acquaintances in quite some time. My bad. I’ll blame it on the move, or the rain, or sun or whatever. But It’s time to rectify the situation. And with a good liqueur too. A useful liqueur. I found myself at loose ends yesterday afternoon. As they say “idle hands are the devil’s playthings.” Not wishing to be the toy of the great deceiver, I decided to make myself busy. I started a Balkan-style yogurt and set it aside to culture, but still had time on my hands. The yogurt is destined for coconut as well, coincidentally. I had purchased a 375 ml white rum from the local NSLC outlet store. It was my intention to infuse it with desiccated coconut for a week. By the time I was ready to do it I had lost my enthusiasm for the week long wait. There must be a better/faster/easier way... As thick as whipped cream, and $1.29 at the Superstore. Can't beat that. As usual, thoughts turned to coconut milk. I find coconut milk almost a panacea. I stocked up on my favourite brand the last time I was in town. I love this brand. I really do. It has a thousand uses, apparently. This coconut milk (if you can call it that) is thick like whipped cream. It’s also a little sweet, sort of like a simple syrup. If I was making clear coconut rum liqueur that’s what I would do. Steep the rum, make a simple syrup and combine. I added a little sugar and some vanilla just to sweeten and round out the coconut taste. And I thinned it with some milk. Heating the mixture gently dissolved the sugar. Then it was as simple as mixing in the rum and bottling. I usually make 3 x 375 ml with my liqueur recipes. This one made a full 4 bottles, plus some for the cook. Mind you it’s only around 10% alc. vol. My others are about 15%. Heat the coconut, milk and sugar until the sugar dissolves. No need to boil. It still tastes... dangerous. This is such a quick and easy recipe that you can decide in the morning to have cocktails in the afternoon and even have it chilled. Less than one half hour to be exact. That includes bottling it. This will find its way into Pina Coladas for sure very soon. Even on the rocks it will be delicious. Once the weather warms a little more onto the back deck we will go! Coconut Cream Liqueur Time: 20 min | Yield 4 x 375 ml 2 x 398 ml thick coconut milk 1 x 398 ml milk 1/2 cup sugar 1 tsp vanilla 375 ml white rum Mix together the coconut milk, milk, sugar and vanilla. Gently heat just until the sugar is dissolved. It will be luke warm – not boiling. Remove from the heat and stir in the rum. Bottle. Refrigerate this liqueur. It has milk in it. Wasn’t that easy? ....................................................................................................................... Questions? Comments? Derogatory remarks? Just ask! I’ll answer as best I can. If you like this post feel free to share it using any of the links. If you repost, please give me credit and a link back to this site.

Nutella liqueur is outrageously easy to make with just three ingredients. Yes, really.

It's made with a combination of vodka, gin, bitter orange peel and cloves. And this DIY blue curaçao liqueur adds vibrance and color to cocktails.

Each of us needs something – food, liquor, pot, whatever – to help us survive. Dracula needs blood. – Frank Langella This may look "girly," but don't be fooled. It's about 13-14% alc. vol. What a weird quote from a good actor. Maybe all the intelligent lines come from another’s pen…. Many celebrities are like that. Have you ever seen a reporter ask a model about fashion? It's painful. But that’s neither here nor there. The reason for my post is that It’’s been a while since I’ve bottled up some booze, and even longer since I’ve attempted a “cream” liqueur. I believe I have cracked that last particular nut. Or at least it appears to have been cracked by my end result. That bodes well for a whole series of liqueurs I have in mind. This particular blend of ingredients ws an accident – because I was in a rush at the liquor store and not paying attention. I knew I was going in to buy "not vodka" and in my haste grabbed a bottle of gin. I wanted to make a homemade version of “Baja Rosa®.” I was supposed to be buying tequila, not gin. Thank goodness gin makes just as good a liqueur. It’s just not tequila. To rectify my stupidity I now have a batch of “tequila rosa” steeping. But back to the “cream” business. I have made actual liqueurs with cream, or cream to be added before drinking. I have made infusions with part-whey part water, but I have never used whey in this volume before. What would happen? The short answer is that it works. I was reading a few days ago about Portuguese milk liqueur. It sounds really good (and easy). Essentially you put milk, vodka, sugar and lemon in a jar and let it sit a few days. The curds separate out from the milk, and after you filter several times, you get a clear liqueur. The “creaminess” comes from the mouth-feel of the whey as opposed to what we think of here as a creamy drink. I have to admit using a lot of whey is the “way” to go. I would imagine that the whey adds some shelf stability to the finished liqueur as well. But don’t quote me on that. It's pure speculation. The strawberries always look so gross after the alcohol leeches the colour out. Strawberry Cream Gin Time: 3 days | About 13% alc. vol. | Yield 1250 ml 1 lb strawberries 1 cup water 1 cup sugar 1/2 lemon 375 ml gin 2 cups skim milk juice of 1/2 lemon Stem and slice the strawberries. Place them in a saucepan with the water and sugar. Bring the mixture to a boil, reduce the heat to medium and let it cook for 5 minutes. Remove the cooked strawberries from the heat and let cool. Then pour the fruit and liquid into a large jar with a well fitting lid. Pour in the gin, and drop in half a whole lemon. Make sure both jar and lemon are well washed beforehand. The liquor, whey and bonus cheese. Seal the jar. Let the infusion sit on your counter, out of direct sunlight, for three days. After three days, strain out the solids. Heat the milk nearly to a boil in a saucepan. Stir in the lemon juice and remove from the heat. Let the milk curdle and cool. Strain out the curds through a piece of clean fine cotton. Add the whey to the infused liquor, mix well, and bottle. The yield is three 375 ml bottles plus a not so small “reward” for the cook. There’s another benefit to making this much whey as well. Knead a little salt and herbs into the curds that are leftover and use it as a spread while you enjoy your liqueur! ........................................ If you like this post feel free to share it using any of the links. If you repost, please give me credit and a link back to this site. Questions? Comments? Derogatory remarks? Just ask!

This is the one. Seriously. Of all the recipes I’ll share with you, this is the one that you just…View Post

When you have a major harvest, do you try recipes you would never have considered before the bonanza arrived? I sure do! Take this plum brandy, for instance. It took a quantity of ripe plums. Any other year I was too stingy with the fruit to do a “frivolous” project such as this. After tasting […]

A celebration of the brave, drunken pioneers who built our civilization one seemingly bad decision at a time, A Brief History of Vice explores a side of the past that mainstream history books prefer to hide. History has never been more fun—or more intoxicating. Guns, germs, and steel might have transformed us from hunter-gatherers into modern man, but booze, sex, trash talk, and tripping built our civilization. Cracked editor Robert Evans brings his signature dogged research and lively insight to uncover the many and magnificent ways vice has influenced history, from the prostitute-turned-empress who scored a major victory for women’s rights to the beer that helped create—and destroy—South America's first empire. And Evans goes deeper than simply writing about ancient debauchery; he recreates some of history's most enjoyable (and most painful) vices and includes guides so you can follow along at home. You’ll learn how to: • Trip like a Greek philosopher. • Rave like your Stone Age ancestors. • Get drunk like a Sumerian. • Smoke a nose pipe like a pre–Columbian Native American. “Mixing science, humor, and grossly irresponsible self-experimentation, Evans paints a vivid picture of how bad habits built the world we know and love.”—David Wong, author of John Dies at the End Product DetailsISBN-13: 9780147517609 Media Type: Paperback Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group Publication Date: 08-09-2016 Pages: 272 Product Dimensions: 5.30(w) x 7.95(h) x 0.75(d)About the Author Robert Evans is an editorial manager at Cracked.com. His articles rack up an average of sixty-four million views a year. He was a contributor to the bestselling You Might Be a Zombie and The De-Textbook.Read an Excerpt Read an Excerpt CHAPTER 1 Mother Nature: History's First Bartender The most important history lesson I ever learned startedwith a big white bucket of rotting fruit in the kitchen of my first apartment. I was nineteenat the time--too young to buy booze, but too old to spend my weekends sober. Itwas a conundrum. Sure, I knew people who were over twenty-one and willing tobuy me alcohol. But most of them were just as shady as you?d expect based onthe fact that they were willing to buy alcohol for teenagers. Also, I was poorenough that my options for affordable drinking were limited to six-dollarbottles of leaded vodka and, if I was really hard up, Boone's Farm. But a goodfriend of mine made beer in his kitchen, and he'd walked me through the basicchemistry of the fermentation process. I knew it started with yeast, theone-celled fungi that live in vast colonies, feast on sugar, and poop outalcohol. Brewers simply trapped yeast, a bunch of rotting sugary plant matter,and water in a container and let it all sit for a while until, eventually, beerhappened. I couldn'tafford to brew beer, though. A five-gallon batch cost upward of forty dollarsin ingredients, a fortune in teenager money. Thankfully, there was a dirtier,easier, route: I could buy a bunch of cheap fruit, mash it up, toss it into abucket with water and yeast, and let that turn into something foul butintoxicating. My friends and I called the resultant brew "hobo jug wine," andhere is the recipe we used: Ingredients 1 five-gallon food-grade plastic bucket 1 length of hose, a finger's width or so 1 smaller bucket Enough pineapples/oranges/apples/whatever fruit to fillup half the bucket Instructions Peel and chopthe fruit and fill the bucket half full of fruit. Mash it into a pulp, and thenadd water, and cane sugar, if you feel like really taking your sobriety totask. If you're as poor as I was, you can make do with grabbing five gallons' worth of fruit juice concentrate from the grocer's freezer in lieu of honest,God-fearing fruit. Drop a packet of yeast (Fleischmann's bread yeast works justfine) into the mixture, stir, and stick the top of the bucket on. This nextpart's critical: Booze gives off a lot of CO2 while it's fermenting. You'llwant to make a little hole in the lid of the bucket and run the hose out of itand into the smaller bucket filled with water. That hose will let enough CO2escape that your large bucket won't explode into shards of painful plastic-yshrapnel. (If you don?t run the hose into water, you'll get some fruit bitsspewed everywhere.) Alternatively, you can buy what's known as an airlock fromyour local brew store, as well as a five-gallon plastic brew bucket with a holealready in place. Either way, let the vile brew sit for two to four weeks. Tavia Morra My first batchof hobo jug wine burbled away in the kitchen for three weeks before we pulledthe top off and decanted it into bottles. I won?t pretend the brew smelledgood, but I'll remind you that I was nineteen and living in my first apartment.The smell of fermenting fruit was far from the worst odor to seep out of thatkitchen. All that mattered was that it worked. I'd crafted an alcoholicbeverage. It was slightlysour, a little sweet, and tasted more than a bit like bread mold. But it alsogave off the telltale burn of alcohol as it slid down my throat, and by thethird glass I was no longer sober and thus much less judgmental of the flavor.At the time, all I knew was that I'd cracked the code to being a drunk teenagerwithout any money. It was only years later, while researching this book, that Irealized my young self had inadvertently re-created something very close to thefirst booze our primate ancestors ever swigged. Ancient Alcohol in the Animal Kingdom Humans aren't the only species with an appreciation foralcohol, or even the only ones with a tendency to take that appreciation toofar. In 2002, a pack of elephants (young and male, of course) tramped into avillage in Assam, India, stole a bunch of wine, and went on a violent, drunkenbender that cost six people their lives. So alcohol problems aren't unique toHomo sapiens, but we're certainly the species that's taken alcohol thefurthest. It's easy toimagine some starving ancient human shoveling a handful of decomposing marulafruit down his throat and, a few seconds later, realizing he felt fuckingexcellent. But the story of humankind's introduction to alcohol actually startsmuch earlier, before men or women or anything remotely human ever existed. Ourability to metabolize alcohol, and thus get drunk, originated in some of thevery first primates on earth. The enzyme ADH4 is what lets us (and gorillas andmonkeys) digest alcohol, and the variation of this enzyme that lets our speciesappreciate the ethanol in a whiskey sour first showed up around ten millionyears ago. This means therehave been hominids drinking much longer than there have been human beings. Theobvious question is: Why did we hold on to this adaptation? The primates who firststarted using alcohol must've been rewarded for their ability to tolerate itand their desire to seek it out. And reward in that last sentence means "theyhad lots of tiny, drunken animal sex." A casual look at your city's main dragon a Friday night illustrates the most confusing part of this story: Drunkenpeople aren't good at anything but starting fistfights, puking out of carwindows, and having trouble with their erections. And yet alcoholis the one drug we know our primate grand-daddies and -mommies were doingmillions of years ago. So have we always loved drinking to excess? The mostlikely answer lies in the most aptly named theory in scientific history . . . The Drunken Monkey Hypothesis According to the "Drunken Monkey Hypothesis," there's adamn good reason our ancestors started drinking well before the evolutionarytime line's equivalent of five P.M. The Drunken Monkey Hypothesis (yes, that?sthe real name) states that regular drinking carried substantial benefits forour adorable, furry forbearers. By the timefruit starts fermenting, it's gotten absolutely as ripe as it's going to get.Ripe also means "full of sugar" and thus full of calories. You need a lot ofcalories when your whole day is spent swinging from trees and fleeing fromjaguars. After all, one of alcohol's most well known side effects is the beerbelly. Beer and wine and liquor are all dense with calories. A regular drinkinghabit combined with a regular eating habit leads to a much fatter animal.Humans today aren't huge fans of all those extra calories, but that's onlybecause whole gas stations full of them assault our waistlines on an hourlybasis. One of the greatchallenges for any species in the wild is simply not starving to death. Whenyou can travel from points A to B only by walking or running and have to huntand gather all your food, you burn a lot more fuel just staying alive. Alcoholguaranteed our ancestors more precious, life-giving calories. The telltalescent of fermentation was an easy way for them to know when a food was at itsmost caloric. Keeping a solid buzz was enough of an advantage that our simiangreat-[X]-grandparents developed noses specifically attuned to the odor ofethanol. Scientists haveeven gone so far as to confirm that drinking alcohol while eating food makesyou take in more calories than if you just did one after the other. Mixingbooze and food is such a good survival strategy that the only monkeys whofucked enough to pass on their genes were the ones who drank. And yes, there'shard scientific evidence to support that claim. Frank Wiens andAnnette Zitzmann, animal physiologists from the University of Bayreuth,Germany, noted in 2008 that pen-tailed tree shrews really seemed to prefergetting their calories from fermented fruit nectar than from anything else. Pen-tailed treeshrews are significant, because in addition to looking like the result of araccoon mating with a pear, they're considered to be the spitting image of thefirst preprimates, genetically speaking. And while these guys have a lot incommon with our earliest ancestors, they also share something with Russiandockworkers; namely, the ability to put away nine or more drinks in a nightwithout feeling it. The pen-tailed tree shrew lives its life like one gia

A simple recipe for making mandarin-infused vodka using citrus peels. This zero-waste tipple takes two weeks to make and can be used in cooking, cocktails, or in natural cleaning products. Make mandarin vodka in winter when mandarins and oranges are in season and inexpensive.

Make your own DIY rhubarb liqueur with this easy recipe. Makes a great base for unique spring and summer cocktails.

My mom makes the most amazing Cointreau from her home using oranges from the orange trees in her garden.

Making your own complex and refreshing herbal liquor is easier than you might think... capture the healing properties and flavors of your own local herbs and spices in a delicious libation I call "Peridot," modeled after the mysterious Chartreuse.

A fruity festive pie filling originating in England in medieval times.

These Bourbon Cherries are perfect for gifting or adding to cocktails.