Kitchen Cocktails

I recently came across an article about making flavoured vodka in the dishwasher and thought I might give it a go sometime. It is my son's fiancee's birthday this week and as she is a girl who loves her cocktails, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to try it out.

If cocktails are your thing too, here is what you need - one bottle of vodka, mine was a 70cl bottle, and one 4 oz/100g bag of hard-boiled sweets. I bought my Saltire sweets on a recent trip to the Scottish Borders with this project in mind, I thought they were an appropriate reminder for my soon-to-be daughter-in-law, of the Scottish side of the family :)

I have seen recipes for the flavoured vodka using jelly babies or Gummi bears, but the recommendations are that hard-boiled sweets/candies are the most successful. Anyhow, it seems a bit gruesome to be cutting up babies and teddy bears and then dousing them in vodka, but that might just be me :)

First up, you need to grind up the sweets/candies. I used a coffee grinder to do this until I had a powder like granulated sugar, as you can see above. Then decant about a glass of vodka from the bottle.

Tip the powdered sweets into the bottle, replace the cap and wrap the bottle in a double layer of cling film.

Place the wrapped bottle on the shelf of your dishwasher. ( Linda isn't your potholder a great match for my vodka?)

Put your dishwasher on at a Hot Wash Setting, 70 degrees, and then let the dishwasher do all the work.

When the programme is finished remove the bottle from the dishwasher, remove the cling film and leave the bottle to cool down. If you have used jelly-like sweets to flavour your vodka you may need to strain the vodka at this point, but I didn't need to with the powdered, hard-boiled sweets.

Keep the flavoured vodka in the freezer until you are ready to serve up some cocktails. It might be best to invite some friends round as I gather that once opened the flavoured vodka should be drunk within 1 week. I haven't tested this yet though, so might need to make another bottle to try out the theory!

As it happens I have another bag of bright orange Irn Bru flavoured sweets set aside for exactly this purpose :) Irn Bru for the non-Scot is known as "Scotland's other national drink" the first, naturally, being whisky, which incidentally it partners with very well apparently. Not being a whisky drinker I will have to take that on trust.

I hope this has brightened up your Monday morning and do let me know if you find a great combination that I should try.

If nothing else this might encourage adult offspring to empty the dishwasher more often, which will be a result in itself :)

Don't forget to link up tomorrow if you have tried something New to You this month too.

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