Friday, June 3, 2011

Recipes for the Bookworm and the Sexy Librarian

For a sweet kid-friendly cocktail, try this ...
The Bookworm
The Bookworm
1.5 oz. apple juice
2 oz. pineapple juice
3 oz. ginger ale
Mix these together with ice and strain into a cocktail glass.  Garnish with a gummy worm!

This cocktail was something that I didn't spend too much time experimenting with ... though I am very grateful for the opinions of all of the family members who tried it at Easter.  Everyone agreed that the gummy worm garnish was a must (even those who don't like to actually eat gummy worms!).  I liked the taste of an even higher ratio of pineapple juice but more will make the juices look particularly murky and somewhat unappetizing.

The second cocktail took much more time.  I wanted all of the ingredients to have a symbolic connection to librarianship, and I decided to use Benedictine fairly early on.  However, one of the other ingredients that I really wanted to include was Godiva liqueur (symbolizing social activism).  What I didn't think about was that the Godiva has a creamy base, and it looked like really old sour milk when I added other ingredients (especially things like vodka).  I did lots of experimentation - even trying the addition of ginger ale which got rid of the curdled aspect but added a light brown foam that also looked weird.  A friend suggested garnishing that version with a chocolate curl, but it still didn't look right and actually wasn't all that tasty.  At that point, I had the recipe down for the Bookworm, so I decided to drop the Godiva and use the Bookworm recipe as a starting point.  Because how else do Sexy Librarians start than as Bookworms, right? :)  After that point, the recipe developed much more smoothly.

The Sexy Librarian
The Sexy Librarian
1 oz. apple juice
2 oz. pineapple juice
1.5 oz. vodka
splash of Benedictine
Mix ingredients together with ice and strain into a cocktail glass.  Garnish with a cherry on a cocktail sword.

And the symbolic meanings are:  apple juice represents acquisition of knowledge (an apple for the teacher),  pineapple juice is a symbol of hospitality because libraries welcome all sorts of people, vodka stands for all those long classic Russian novels (everybody knows the title of War and Peace even if they haven't read the book), Benedictine is for the monks of the middle ages who kept the written word alive with their illuminated manuscripts, the cherry is a nod to those steamy romances whose readership is huge, and the cocktail sword is the librarian's tool for cutting through red tape!

Cheers!

2 comments:

  1. adorable! love the cocktail titles! I may have to serve the bookworm drinks at Gracie's next birthday.

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  2. Oh, good on you!
    Forget the "...walks into a bar..."
    With those ingredients, I'll just amble into the liquor store and stock up on vodka and Benedictine; make me up a batch o'those tasty (and healthy - apple and pineapple juices)Sexy Librarian libations and maybe read a steamy graphic novel of some Whoop-de-do Classic.Summer reading at its best!
    Might have the Godiva as a chaser hmmmmmmmmm,
    Bottoms up! (as it were)
    Cheers!
    Lis

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