Hot Pink Flamingo

Ever since I saw a BBC video about flamingo chicks and the brightly colored "milk" they are fed just after they hatch, I have been thinking about creating a vivid flamingo cocktail.

Unfortunately most pink cocktails are more bland than hot and I wanted mine with a but of punch.

I finally came up with a solution: Using a riff on Brazilian lemonade as a pink base and then adding a bit of chili liqueur for the hot part.

Hot Pink Flamingo

• 6 cl cachaca - I used Fio Do Bigode
• 8 cl pink bergamotte-ade - Brazilian style*
• 3 cl chili liqueur - I used Ancho Reyes

Measure everything into a shaker,  fill shaker with ice and shake for 10 sekunds. Strain into cocktail glass - garnish with a raspberry on a cocktail pick, serve with pinkish beet buttered pop corn**.

* Pink bergamotte-ade

Cut the two ends of a small bergamotte and then cut it into 8 bits but the bits and whatever juice that ran out into a blender. Add a 2-3 fresh og frozen raspberries - just to color the mix pink - add a few dashed of yuzu and 700 ml cold water. Blend for a few seconds, then strain the mixture and pour it back into the blender after rinsing it out. Now add 3 table spoons condensed sweeten milk and blend again. Taste and adjust color with more raspberries if necessary and the level of sweetness with simple syrup.

Strain and chill until you are ready for cocktails.

** Pinkish beet buttered pop corn   

Clarify 50 g of butter, then add some chili sauce and fresh beet juice or the pickling liquid from pickled beets and mix well. You may have to pour the mixture into a small jar and shake it to get the two to mix.

Pop corn and then coat them lightly with the red butter and salt. Serve hot.

Lemon Cherry Cachaca Smash

Leaving New Orleans was not easy this year. Even after one whole day of rain that city grows on you and Tales of The Cocktails is an amazing reason to visit.

Not even a long and bothersome journey home involving not one but two reroutings and a seven hour wait in Amsterdam could wipe smile off my face.

I even managed a friendly grimace while queuing to report my luggage missing. It still haven't turned up and it contains quite a few treasures and most of my summer wardrobe.

But I still have my little black note book with ideas, stories, interesting facts and overall impressions from four brilliant days of seminars, tastings and networking.

At the same time I came home to the Danish weather is outdoing itself with high temperatures and lots of sun.

While this place will never be the tropics tonight it is time for a tropical drink and as we are less than a week from Mixology Monday and the theme of The Smash I figured I would put a theory to the test that I developed on Friday in a ballroom at the Royal Sonesta Hotel while listening to Jared Brown and Anistatia Miller talking about the journey from garden, field and forrest to bottle and glass.

The two of them were advising against adding sugar to a bottle of booze with fruit when you want to make a liqueur. The reson being that natures aim for osmotic balance would push the sugar from outside into the fruit instead of drawing the sugar from the fruit into the booze.

In other words by disregarding their advice you can make sour fruits sweet.

So today about an hour before mixing my drink I peeled an lemon and broke it into bits in a bowl and the covered it with a lavender simple syrup.

Then I took the cue from a drink mixed by the guys from Duck and Cover Bar in Copenhagen they call Frederiksdal Fizz where a cachaca aged in cherry wood is mixed with cherry liqueur and seltzers and married it with my idea of sweet lemons:

• 6 cl of cachaca aged in brazilian cherry wood - I used Germana's Caetano's cacha
• 2 and a half slices of lavender syrup infused fresh lemon
• 2 cl cherry liqueur - I used Frederiksdal New Nordic
• Lemon soda - I used Pellegrino Lemonata
• sprig of lavender 
• Maraschino cherries - I used my own.

Muddle the lemon, the lavender flower petals and the cachaca in a shaker tin. Fill a tall glass halfway with crushed ice and add the content of the shaker, add more ice and the as much lemon soda as you want, top drink off with yet more ice and drizzle the cherry liqueur on top. (Boozy sno ball anyone?)

Add straws and garnish with a couple of marashino cherries.