Bansko Sour cherry ideal for a Cosmopolitan.
You can’t rush things especially if it involves alcohol or food. The joy of our cocktail nights here at the Avalon is that they involve both. In my garden we have a young, healthy and very fecund sour cherry tree we harvest the fruit in July and turn it into a syrup for our Cosmopolitans in the winter. Each year we normally make around a hundred small bottles of concentrated syrup that we then dilute like Ribena at home or use neat in our Cosmos at the hotel. The Avalon Cosmopolitan uses this juice/syrup instead of cranberry juice to create one of the best cocktails I have ever tasted.
This year my life has been a little hectic with politics, cycling and trips back and forth around Europe so we called in some friends to help us bring in the harvest. In the end we really didn’t need all 6 of them as this summer has been really wet and a lot of the fruit rotted on the tree before it ripened. What we did get is now bubbling away in the kitchen, ready to be bottled and stored for the next 6 months until it gets unleashed on our guests in the winter.
Sour cherries make a great cordial. The sour flavour of the fruit works brilliantly with vodka and triple sec and makes what I think is the perfect Cosmopolitan .
Recipe:-
40ml Good quality export strength Vodka, I recommend Stolichnya Crystal but Savoy works!
40ml Triple sec, please don’t substitute Grand Marnier as it is too sweet you want a good quality dry orange liquor .
20ml lemon juice.
60ml sour cherry syrup.
Shaken with as much ice as you can get in the cocktail mixer and the lemon peel if you feel like it. Serve straight up in a frozen coupe or at least chill the coupe by filling it with ice and leaving it to chill while you make the drink . Shake until frost appears on the outside of the shaker, drink and make merry!
