(Photo: Chris Noto looms over an Irish Whiskey Cocktail on St. Patrick’s Day.)
I’ve blogged about it twice over the space of more than a year, but last night I finally tried the nameless Irish Whiskey Cocktail that was spawned by a challenge the master distiller of Bushmills himself. (Proper credit: Though I mistakenly told everyone last night that the master distiller, Colum Egan, had come up with the recipe, more properly he challenged some top bartenders to create Irish whiskey-based cocktails, and this was the one featured in the article I read.)
The recipe is simple (all three links, above, will get you to it), but also time consuming. Since there were a goodly number of people I had convinced to try this new cocktail, I quadrupled the recipe and did it in a blender, rather than a cocktail shaker.
That means I used four ounces of Bushmills Irish Whiskey, two ounces of cherry liqueur, two ounces of orange juice, and four raw eggs.
Firstly, I’m glad that I used real cherry liqueur and not something like cherry brandy, because they are very different drinks, and this cocktail needed the heavy depth of the liqueur. Secondly, if you try this at home, add the eggs first, because the yolks can ‘plop’ a fairly hefty splash out of a blender if you’re not careful.
A couple of pulses later, and we had a nice, light brown, frothy drink. Poured into martini glasses, it easily served five or almost six, so quadrupling the recipe was no biggie.
Everyone was hesitant (even me), but we all gamely tried it.
Verdict: Delicious!
Although the drink was a tad on the strong side, it was delicious. There was no raw egg taste, and you could hardly taste any of the individual ingredients. Instead, they blended together to create a fully new flavour.
It was like a light, but very spicy egg nog. The whiskey provided the spice, I’m sure, but it tasted for all the world like a Christmas drink transposed to spring. It didn’t have the artificial sweetness or vanilla flavour of a commercial Christmas egg nog; instead it was light and frothy and the egg added a delightful creaminess.
Probably, some nutmeg or cinnamon wouldn’t have been amiss, to sprinkle on top, but I would be wary of too much experimentation.
The original recipe calls for straining into a chilled glass, and I do think that cold ingredients and cold glassware make for a better drink — as it warms, it’s slightly less appealing.
So for Round Two, I plopped a couple of ice cubes into the blender, hoping to lower the temperature. Then we realized that there was mint chocolate-chip ice cream in the freezer, so we added a couple of scoops of that.
Round Two was not a dismal failure, but it was definitely more disappointing than the original. Rather than a minty freshness, or a chocolatey-chip sweetness, the ice cream mostly added a weird colour to the drink. And without the strength of the whiskey coming through, the eggy nature of the drink was more apparent.
In fact, though the second attempt was more dilute, I found it smelled a lot more like raw egg, and it was less appetizing to drink. Stick to the original.
But stick to the original I will. This was a great drink, all in all. And it’s a bit of a fancy one to make, too, with the raw egg, if you like being a showoff.
