Cider Cup
Before a week ago I had never heard of a Cider Cup. Denise and I were trolling through our drinks library to find some interesting looking beer cocktail recipes when we saw this really great picture of this glowing, sparkling orange colored drink with a lime peal twisting through it; the glass itself was in the middle of a cluster of yellow and red streaked apples. It’s amazing how thirsty you can get just by looking at a picture. Denise and I looked at each other and said almost at the same time, “Let’s make that.”
Unfortunately, our Cider Cup didn’t look anything like the one in the photo (which was in The Ultimate Book of Cocktails by Stuart Walton referenced last week), but it tasted great. We didn’t really follow the recipe to the letter and improvised a little out of necessity. Here’s what we did:
We sliced a whole orange and crushed the orange together with ice using one of our trusty wooden spoons. This made a fruity orange slush into which we poured 5 measures of creme sherry, 3 measures of brandy, 3 measures of our favorite orange liqueur: Bauchant, and 2 measures of amaretto. Into this concoction we decanted a bottle of Doc’s Draft Hard Apple Cider (4.5% ABV).
When we tasted it, we thought it was similar to sangria — an orange and apple sangria. The amaretto and sherry dominated the flavor profile and I’d be tempted to back off on those additions to allow the cider flavors to come through better. On the whole we found this to be a refreshing drink. It’s probably more appropriate for the summer, but it went down nicely over the holidays.
