Some Like It Hot: Four Hot Cocktail Recipes

To quote songwriter Frank Loesser and crooner Dean Martin, “Baby it’s cold outside.” Too cold for that cold beer and too cold for that craft cocktail with the hand-chiseled ball of ice. No, when it’s dead-of-winter cold, you need a hot drink. Preferably a spiked hot drink. Coffee, tea, rum, bourbon, scotch, cider…we’ve tracked down four hot cocktail recipes that will raise your temperature even as the mercury drops to single digits outside.

Tip: Warm each mug by running under or sitting them in hot water prior to filling with your liquid mood shifters.

Fortune Favors The Bold Coffee
14 ounces silver cachaça (Brazilian rum)
Seeds from four vanilla pods
24 ounces hot coffee
2 ounces black currant or raspberry liqueur (Cassis or Chambord)
Heated cream if desired

Scrape the seeds from the vanilla pods and stir them into the hot coffee. Separate the rum evenly into five warmed mugs and do the same with the liqueur you’ve chosen. Pour in the hot coffee, adding cream if desired. Put your nose to the mug rim to breathe in the swirls of steam before the first sip.

India Meets Ireland for Tea
Heat 20 ounces water to a boil
Add 8 ounces chai tea mix, or 5 bags, and steep to a deep fragrance, about 5minutes.
Warm 20 ounces of half & half.

Put a shot (1.5 ounces) of Bushmill’s Single Malt 16 into five mugs, then parse the hot chai and warm milk into each mug and look to book your next sabbatical.

Backrub Cider Rules
12 ounces Maker’s Mark Bourbon Whiskey
28 ounces apple cider
5 cinnamon sticks
12 whole cloves
5 lemon slices

Heat to steaming and pour into five warmed mugs, sharing the sticks, cloves and slices. Put another log on the fire now and sit close to keep the stories coming low and slow into the wee hours.

Chocolate Like You Mean It
16 ounces half & half
1/8 teaspoon salt or to taste
3 ounces 64% dark chocolate
3 ounces 35% milk chocolate
3 tablespoons cocoa powder
12 ounces Drambuie (honey & herbed scotch liqueur)
2 ounces creme de menthe or peppermint schnapps

Slowly heat together the half & half and salt, then add the chocolates to the pan to melt. Distribute the Drambuie and crème de menthe between four mugs and add the chocolate crème mixture. Send out on a try after garnishing with whipped cream and a chocolate curl. Or did you eat the rest of the chocolate while stirring at the stove?

 
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