If in doubt, pour some booze on it

I have to admit that I have a default setting when it comes to foodstuffs. If I have no idea what to do with something, I make it into an alcoholic drink.

This year I've done a few (including my ginger beer and and some experimental elderflower champagne), but it all culminated in a Christmas-inspired liqueur frenzy. I get most of my liqueur information from this excellent site but tend to ignore all their advice and just make it up as I go.

The two main recipes I made this year were an odd concoction of elderberry and pomegranate liqueur plus the filthy-sounding milk liqueur.

I picked some elderberries from the tree at the end of my road, and having never actually tasted them I was loathe to commit a whole load of vodka to its cause. To counteract any possible issues I popped to a local greengrocers and noticed they had pomegranates on sale. Bonus! So two pomegranates, 135g of cooked up elderberries in sugar (it's all I could pick) and vodka sat in a bottle for a few months. I fished out the elderberries after a couple of months, leaving the pomegranates for another few weeks. In hindsight I should have separated them in some sort of bagging device, rather than spend hours individually picking them out of the mush. Still, turned out ok in the end.



For the milk liqueur, I found this bizarre-looking recipe on my travels around t'interwebs and thought I absolutely had to try it. It's really not as disgusting as it sounds! I had a few coffee filter-related accidents, so the final result was a triple filtered amber nectar. Sadly, I didn't really get to try it as it went to other people for Christmas presents. I'll have to get reports back. It certainly looked and smelled good, despite how grim it looked before filtering.