Trail Mix Muffins and Sloe Gin

In preparation for a late-winter snowstorm (and we former scouts have learned to always be prepared), we holed ourselves up with some Trail Mix Muffins, a hike-worthy muffin variation from Baking Bites. It's a different flavor than some of the more ordinary muffins.

Trail Mix Muffins (yields 24)

2 1/2 cups all purpose flour

1 cup rolled oats (plain oatmeal)

1 1/2 cups sugar

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp salt
2 large eggs

2 cups buttermilk

1/2 cup vegetable oil

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 1/2 cups trail mix

*You can use any kind of trail mix you want, so we used a combination of three.  That means our muffins are full of peanuts, almonds, cashews, cranberries, raisins, golden raisins, chocolate chips, yogurt chips, and sunflower seeds.  It's a mouthful, but we like being inclusive.  Coconut would also be pretty delicious here.

Preheat oven to 400F. Line two 12-cup muffin tins with paper liners. 
In a large bowl, whisk together flour, oats, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt.
 In a medium bowl, whisk together eggs, buttermilk, vegetable oil and vanilla extract.  Pour into dry ingredients and mix until just combined.  Stir in trail mix.
 Divide batter evenly into prepared muffin cups. Each cup will be about 3/4 full.
 Bake for 15 minutes, or until muffins are golden brown and a toothpick inserted into the center of each comes out clean.
 Cool on a wire rack.

These would be perfect to make for a quick breakfast treat, since we usually have most of these ingredients in our kitchens anyway.  They're extremely unique, with a different flavor in every bite, and we really like that.  Even the sunflower seeds don't get lost in the taste.  It's a little like eating bird food, and we mean that in the best way possible. 

If by some chance we can't finish all of these before they get stale, we're all set to turn them into muffin biscotti, also courtesy of Baking Bites.

(We meant to illustrate how the muffin explodes with Trail Mix flavor, but doesn't it just look like it threw up?)

While we were baking, outside the apartment the snow started falling for what we'd been warned would be New York's worst storm of the winter. Sloe Gin Fizzes may not seem apropos for a blizzard, but Shake would disagree. A few years ago, before the cocktail obsession, he waited out a storm at a Park Slope bar with a friend, drinking what the bartender had testified were "Sloe Gin Fizzes" -- a highball made of gin, Rose's Lime juice, and soda. They were good drinks (more like a Rickey) to have while contemplating the white streets outside, but nothing like a real Sloe Gin Fizz. Unlike regular gin, flavored with juniper and other herbs, sloe gin is a liqueur flavored with sloe (blackthorn) plums. With the snow coming down outside, it seemed like a good opportunity to correct that old error.  

We picked up a bottle of Plymouth Sloe Gin at the closing of the beloved Red Hook liquor store LeNell's. The first thing to try, of course, was the true Sloe Gin Fizz: combine 1 1/2 oz of sloe gin, 1 oz lemon juice, and 1 tsp sugar. Shake with ice and strain in a highball glass (or a mason jar, if you're classy). Fill with ice and soda. 

This goes down like a Jones Soda on a summer -- er, blustery March -- day.  Very light and sweet, it could almost be a brunch drink. The low alcohol content -- just 52 proof, not the usual 80+ of most spirits -- means you could be looking into a very long brunch.

The Sloe Gin Cocktail is just the opposite -- sweet and thick, with more of an alcoholic taste.  The taste isn't bad in and of itself, but the drink overall seems a bit like cough syrup.  If you've got a scratch in your throat and want to try it: 2 1/4 oz sloe gin, 1/4 oz dry vermouth, dash orange bitters, stirred with ice and strained into a cocktail glass.

Similar but better is the Tip Toe Cocktail, which is helped by a bit of lemon juice.  Mix 1 1/2 oz sloe gin, 1/2 oz dry vermouth, 1/2 oz lemon juice with ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

Gin and Tonic cupcakes

What better food to bring to a cocktail party than a snack that's based on a cocktail? Combining alcohol and baked goods is right up our alley, so we decided on these Gin & Tonic cupcakes from Yumsugar for a cocktail party we attended.


INGREDIENTS
Cake:
2 medium egg whites
Pinch of sea salt
1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar
1/2 cup confectioner's sugar, sifted
1/4 cup flour
1 1/2 tablespoons tonic water

*This recipe makes 12 cupcakes, but we doubled it and made them mini for the purpose of this cocktail party snack.

Frosting:
1/2 cup mascarpone
1 tablespoon gin
2 tablespoons corn syrup
Green food coloring
Lime slices covered in sugar or lime jelly candies, for garnish

*We added one more tablespoon of corn syrup and a couple teaspoons of Rose's lime juice to make this sweeter, but beware - it changes the consistency of the frosting.

DIRECTIONS
Preheat the oven to 325° Fahrenheit.

With an electric hand mixer, beat the egg whites in a large bowl with salt and cream of tartar until they are risen, like a soft merengue. Now beat in the sugar, a couple of tablespoons at a time, sprinkling it over the egg whites and beating about 20 seconds with each addition. Fold the sifted flour into the meringue in three stages, and then stir in the tonic water.

Arrange muffin paper baking cups inside a muffin tin and fill two thirds full. Bake for 15-20 minutes until lightly golden on the surface and still springy to the touch. We figured out that when these are really golden brown they're more chewy than cakey, so try not to overbake. Remove and let cool.


Spoon mascarpone into a bowl and beat in the gin and then the syrup and tint it the palest green with a little food coloring. This ended up tasting cheesy and not very sweet, so we added some more corn syrup and some Rose's lime juice. Unfortunately, the exra liquid and over-mixing made the frosting less creamy and separate a bit, so it tasted better, but looked a little off. If anyone has a solution to this, please let us know. Anyway, frost and top with a lime slice or candy.


These cupcakes are light and soft, a lot like angel food cake. They don't taste much like tonic, but the lightness kind of gives the illusion of a mixer.

Now, it's no secret on this blog that Bake hates gin. Luckily, this frosting is creamy and just a little sweet, so it's the perfect way for her to work her way up to actually imbibing the juniper liquor.

Sweet Potato Cheesecake and Cider Drinks

We wanted to test this recipe for super-secret professional reasons, and also because it sounds delicious.

Baking lore attests that cheesecakes are too difficult a dessert to make, so most people don’t attempt them. We scoff at baking lore. Continuing with our festive shake & bake endeavors, we tackled this autumnal cheesecake without reservations. It’s surprisingly simple and the crust is made with ginger snaps, which is the biggest draw with this cheesecake. In fact, when we told people what we were baking a Sweet Potato Cheesecake we were met with approving nods, as soon as we explained the crust the response turned to envious moans.

In the interest of time we opted for store-bought ginger snaps, which work perfectly, though if we were making this for a party we would probably make our own cookies. Then again, we could say we made our own and no one would really know; they’re all smashed and smothered in butter anyway.

Sweet Potato Cheesecake

ingredients

Crust:

• 1 ½ cups crushed gingersnaps
• ¼ cup sugar
• 1/3 cup unsalted butter, melted

Cake:

• 3 8-oz. packages cream cheese
• 1 cup sugar
• ¼ cup light brown sugar
• 1 ¾ cups sweet potatoes, cooked and mashed (approx. one large potato)
• 2 eggs
• 2/3 cup evaporated milk
• 1 tbsp cornstarch
• pinch of freshly ground nutmeg

Topping:

• 2 cups regular sour cream
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

1. Crust: Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Combine crumbled cookies, sugar, and butter and press into the bottom of a 9-inch springform pan. Press onto the bottom and 1 inch up the sides. Bake at 350 degrees for 7. (Be sure to put the springform pan into a larger baking dish, because if it leaks you’ll set off the smoke alarm.)

2. Filling: combine the cream cheese and the sugars in a large bowl, then whisk in the sweet potato, eggs, and milk. Then add cornstarch and nutmeg. (We used an electric handmixer to make this all consistently mixed.) Pour the filling into the crust. Bake at 350 degrees for 1 hour, or until the edge is set.

3. Topping: Combine the sour cream, sugar, and vanilla. Spread over the warm cheesecake. The topping will begin to melt once you put it on the hot cake, so you’ll want to be speedy about this. Return to the oven, still at 350 degrees, for 5 minutes.

On chilling and impatience:
Cool on a rack, then refrigerate for several hours or overnight. Cake will continue to cook and set while chilling.

If you’re like us, you want to eat cheesecake right now, and you regret that you began making this after 7:30 pm. You will do each step simultaneously and with lightning speed, at no cost to the texture or flavor of the dessert. This makes for a food coma-inducing midnight snack, and so we chilled for about 2 ½ hours.

Remove sides of pan and serve.

As for the drinks, we decided to stick with the Fall theme. It’s not cold enough for hot toddies or mulled wine yet, though, so we thought about trying a beer-cocktail. “Do those exist?” You ask. “No,” we answer, after a fruitless search. The full spectrum of beer cocktails involves dumping a shot of some liquor into a glass of beer. The outliers are the Black Velvet (Guinness and champagne) and the Shandy (beer and lemon soda) but those aren’t exactly challenging.So instead, we decided to try some cider cocktails. This time our investigation bore fruit (ba-dum-dum). So we selected a few ciders from the local gourmet beer store Bierkraft to test out these drinks.

We bought five brands of cider:

Aspall Organic English Draft Cider: It didn’t take long to realize this award-winning cider shouldn’t be wasted in a mix, so it went straight back in the fridge.
Doc’s Draft Hard Apple Cider: “The Great American Drink" Not the internationally-renowned

cider of Aspall, but the one is large enough that we realized we’d be “bobbing for apples” if we tried to drink this one as well as the others.
Harpoon Cider: Very sweet, with a strong apple flavor.
Original Sin Cider: Drier and more tart, like beer.

Magners Irish Cider: Tastes like a milder, perhaps watered-down version of the previous two. That may be why Magner’s never gets us drunk.

On to the drinks!

DEVON GIN

This recipe comes from The Ultimate Book of Cocktails, a large-format book that came as a Christmas gift. (Less info here on Amazon). Though it doesn’t exactly possess the authority of the New York Bartender’s Guide, it is written by Stuart Walton author of Out of It, a Cultural History of Intoxication and, less promisingly, A Natural History of Human Emotions.

The measurements are unusual in this, because the recipe calls for measuring spoons instead of jiggers. We haven’t measured gin in a teaspoon since we babysat.

In rocks glass:

• 3 parts 4 ½ tbsp sweet cider (we used Harpoon)
• ¾ part 3 tsp gin
• ¼ part 1 tsp Cointreau

With ice in glass, stir in cider and gin. Float Cointreau atop.

This recipe ends up being much smaller than expected, so we doubled it to make a reasonable cocktail. No matter how sweet the Harpoon is, this is really just a gin drink with a bit of fruity carbonation. Bake has never really liked gin (whereas Shake likes the promise than gin will remind you that you drank it the next morning) and this drink didn’t exactly convert her.

But don’t worry, there are plenty of variations. There is actually a drink on the online Cocktail Database called the Devonia Cocktail, served without ice, with more gin and substituting orange bitters for Cointreau. This may not qualify as a variation -- neither source references the other -- but it’s awfully similar in name and ingredients.

If you have orange bitters on hand it’s probably worth experimenting. To make orange bitters, see here. This is actually a very simple recipe compared to others online. We’ve made it and the bitters are delicious. Bitter is a misnomer, really. Add a few cloves to this recipe if you have them.

Another similar mix to the Devon and Devonia, also from the online Cocktail Database, is the Palisades Cocktail. It's the same as the Devonia but replaces Orange bitters with aromatic – Angostura, usually – bitters. If you have Angostura, then go ahead and try it. But if you make orange bitters you will never want to bother with plain old Angostura again. Why eat chicken when you can have steak?

No matter what you add, whether Cointreau, orange bitters, or Angostura, gin owns this drink. We ended up adding a bit more cider to the Devon to cut the gin taste and keep us sober enough to enough on to embark on our next cocktail:

CIDER NECTAR

• ½ oz brandy
• ¼ oz lemon juice (1/2 oz is approx. ½ a lemon)
• ¼ tsp sugar (superfine a.k.a. "bar")

Stir into a glass of ice (put ice in after you dissolve the sugar in the lemon juice –ice will prevent dissolving). Fill rest with cider. Original Sin is a good choice for this, because with the sugar and lemon it doesn’t need any more sweetness (when we drank a second round with Magner's you almost couldn't taste the rest of the drink).

Our attempt at a Fall cocktail become more of a refreshing Summer drink, just like a rickey or a julep.

And now, in honor of “cider drinks”, a song that reminds us of the good times: