12 Drinks of Christmas 2016: South of the Border Eggnog Cocktail Recipe

12 Drinks of Christmas 2016: South of the Border Eggnog Cocktail Recipe

12 Drinks of Christmas 2016: South of the Border Eggnog Cocktail Recipe

Happy holidays!

It’s the time of the year for holiday decorations, twinkling lights, warm spices, and a rolling series of parties, gatherings, and celebrations. For the second year in a row, we’ll be adding to the festivities with twelve drinks to make all of those parties just a little merrier and brighter.

Today, we’re going to make some improvements to eggnog.

We love the idea of eggnog. A special beverage available only from Thanksgiving to New Year’s? Yes, please. Unparalleled rich creaminess? Sounds great. Allspice, nutmeg, cinnamon, and cloves? Nothing sounds better, or more suitable to the season. The pitch is so compelling that we without fail buy ourselves a half gallon every Thanksgiving weekend. Almost all the time, most of it never gets drank. The reality of eggnog just doesn’t seem to match the vision of it dancing in our heads. We’re not willing to give up on the dream, though. So we asked ourselves, what can we do to help eggnog become what we’ve always believed it can be? Here’s what we came to:

  • Try a little bitterness–we drink our coffee black, but we know many people add a little bit of cream to cut the bitterness and counteract the acidity. What if we did the opposite here, adding a shot of coffee flavor to bring some bitter acidity into the otherwise sweet dairy mix?
  • But keep it in the dessert realm–it being the season for it, we added a dash of mint, since we had some of the good stuff on hand;
  • Lighten it up, but don’t make it diet–nothing seems more against the spirit of eggnog than getting a ‘lite’ version. What does that even mean? That being said, eggnog can be a little on the dense side. We decided to give it a lighter body without a ‘lite’ flavor by shaking it.

The results were so delicious, we might just finish our half gallon this year.

South of the Border Eggnog Cocktail Recipe

Ingredients

  • 4 oz eggnog
  • 2 oz coffee liqueur–we use whatever cheap regional variety we can find, tending to like it even better than Kahlua brand for both taste and price
  • 1 oz creme de menthe–as you might have gathered from earlier in the week, we highly recommend Tempus Fugit

Instructions

  • Shake all ingredients with ice for 20-30 seconds.
  • Serve over ice in a highball glass.

Roberts & June
robertsandjune@gmail.com