Celebratory Christmas cocktails

By Tasneem Merchant

While champagne and wine might be crowd favourites, these cocktails will definitely have your guests coming back for more

Let the mulled wine rest for a while and celebrate with a different poison. Take your celebrations up a notch with these cocktail mixes suggested by ace mixologist, Dimi Lezinska to give your soiree that extra edge.

The Good Wife
Ingredients:
-          45 ml Smirnoff orange
-          13 ml Campari
-          30 ml Raspberry puree
-          10 ml Lime juice
-          12.5 ml Passion fruit

Method:
Put all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker, shake well and pour.

Wolf of BKC
Ingredients:

-          35 ml Jim beam
-          15 ml Cacao
-          30 ml Pineapple puree
-          7.5 ml Lime juice
-          15 ml Egg white
-          Angostura bitter dash

Method:
Put all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker, shake well and pour.

Book of Note
Ingredients:
-          45ml Absolut citron
-          15ml Creme de banana
-          15ml Lime juice
-          1 Egg Yolk
-          15ml French vanilla
Method:
Put all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker, shake well and pour.

Serving ideas by The Good Wife:
1. Candies, aromatic herbs and infused fruits create a totally memorable cocktail experience. Edible garnishes such as celery stalks, carrot sticks, cherries, olives and lemons have long been popular edible garnishes for cocktails

2. You can dress up glass rims with custom-flavoured salts, rosemary sprigs with cranberries, fruit juice ice cubes, candied ginger and even matching lollipops which do double duty as a sweet treat and a stirrer

3. Another twist you can give your serving game is with tea pots and cups. Known as a teapot cocktail, this phenomenon of combining sophisticated afternoon tea paraphernalia with tasty after work drinks is quite popular at The Good Wife

4. Ice cubes with flowers or buds make for a pretty picture. Simply add edible flowers like lavender, rose petals and jasmine buds to ice trays before freezing. You can also add mint leaves into each cube

Serve your cocktails with diced or cubed fresh fruits for a citrus blast. This also lends colour to your drink and makes it instantly more appealing.

Instead of regular ice cubes, prep in advance and freeze flower petals or buds in water. So, when the time comes to serve your drink, you can cool it with these pretty ice cubes. Plus, imagine how pretty these would look piled up in a colourful heap in your ice bucket.