Drinks With A Cherry On Top — 5 Ways To Use The Fruit In Monsoon Cocktails And Mocktails
Complete with a bright, ruby-red hue and lots of tart, sweet and acidic flavours, cherries are widely used in mixology for blending cocktails and mocktails. Their flavours build a fruity depth and a sweet and tangy touch into blends, while their hues add a bright colour pop to a number of alcohol and non-alcoholic drinks.
While grenadine syrup or cherry liqueur are some of the more popular ways of incorporating this fruit in mixology, there are other creative methods too for adding this fruit to drinks blended during monsoons. These alternatives, including making cherry ice or cherry foam, not only build deep hues and an artsy quality into drinks, but they also layer them with complex fruity, robust flavours well-suited to rainy day concoctions.
Read on below to know more about some of the ways in which this brightly coloured, sweet and tart fruit can be incorporated in monsoon mixology:
Cherry Shrubs
Pitted cherries can be brought together with sugar and apple cider vinegar to make a tangy, acidic shrub that adds a lot of sweet, tart and sour flavour to monsoon-time mixes. The shrub can be used to make interesting mocktails too, by topping it off with club soda or sparkling water. It can also be used to build more complex, sweet yet pungent notes into several cocktails, with gin or sparkling wines as their base spirits. The fruity, herbaceous and botanical elements in these liquors would compliment the lightly sweet notes of the cherries to make for layered cocktail blends.
Smoked Or Roasted Cherries
Take a few pitted cherries and toss them onto a pan to roast them lightly before adding to cocktail and mocktail blends. Roasted cherries can be muddled with simple syrup or lime juice to release their caramelised flavours that work exceedingly well with dark rum cocktails made especially at tiki-themed gatherings. The smoky touch in these roasted cherries also lends drinks a slightly robust flavour which is well-suited to rainy day blends. Adding roasted cherries to iced coffees or cold brews is also an excellent way to make rich mocktails for monsoon-time gatherings.
Cherry Ice Cubes
What can double as cooling agents as well as aesthetic garnishes, cherry ice cubes are quite an interesting way to incorporate this fruit into numerous alcoholic and non-alcoholic blends. Either freeze whole cherries in ice cube trays or make a brightly coloured cherry puree and add it to ice moulds. These little cubes of cherry ice can be added to sangrias, highballs and non-alcoholic lemonades to introduce their tart, sweet and lightly acidic notes into these fresh and bright drinks. Their fruity flavours will release themselves slowly into the glass as the cubes melt, increasing the complexity of the blend.
Cherry Foam
Yet another aesthetic way to make use of cherries in dessert-forward cocktails and mocktails is in the form of a cherry foam. Blend cherries with a hint of sugar or egg white to make a silky foam. This can then be used to add a fancy crown to drinks like the whisky sour, gin fizz, a coffee milkshake or a coffee liqueur infused mudslide cocktail. The light pink hue of the foam will bring an artsy effect into drinks – utterly social media worthy – and its sweet, tangy taste will build more nuanced flavours in the blends.
Cherry-Infused Spirits
What can quite easily become monsoon staples at your home bar are spirits infused with cherry essence right at home. Steep frozen or fresh cherries in spirits like vodka or gin for at least a week. The spirits will acquire a ruby-like hue which looks quite luxe and develop a fruity, tart depth, excellent for blending manhattans, rum punches or fruity martini cocktails concocted using 30 ml of cherry-infused gin.
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