Cocktails Friday

We spent our Friday night making and trying out some new cocktails, and then on Saturday we put together a video of our recent travels around England!

White Lady

After spending two epic weeks in England, we decided to opt for a more low key Something Saturday this week. We received some cocktail-making supplies for Christmas and wanted to test them out. Neither one of us had spent any amount of time learning how to make cocktails before, so it was a good reason to try!

We picked out three cocktails in advance, but before we could mix the drinks, we had to purchase supplies. It didn't take long wandering around the store to realize that this wasn't going to be a cheap endeavour... but luckily now we have lots of leftovers. Can't complain.

Some of the supplies

Before we started testing out our bar-tending skills, we decided to work up an appetite skating around the Bannerman Loop. We went there last year as one of our Something Saturdays and are hoping to make outdoor skating more of a regular occurrence. We had a lot of fun - the sky was clear and the Loop wasn't too busy. 

We then made our way back to the apartment, and Luke immediately started in on the cocktail-making. First up was a Singapore Sling. Made with gin, cherry brandy, orange juice, lime juice, pineapple juice, bitters, and Cointreau - it was tasty. It seems like one of the keys to making cocktails properly is ice, ice, ice. Ice in the shaker, then once the ingredients have been put together and shaken, pour it in a glass over ice, and then throw in some more ice for good luck.

Halfway through the cocktail-making process, we discovered that we have a few other cocktail books kicking around the apartment that we had completely forgotten about! We spent some time perusing them before making our next cocktail, the White Lady. It was our first experience preparing a drink with egg whites and it turned out all right! We then tackled the Mojito, one of our go-to drinks when we were in Cuba. Overall, we had a lot of fun testing out new cocktails and we'll be trying some more in the near future with our extra supplies.

Then on Saturday we compiled the footage from our trip to England and made our first travel video! We're really pleased with the result (and our new camcorder). It's amazing how much more of a feel you can get for a place from watching film rather than just looking at photos. Check it out below:

We're hoping to put together more of these types of videos for our future holidays. In case you missed any of the blog posts about our trip to England, you can read them here:
Bristol Monday
Cotswolds Weekend
Greenwich Wednesday

And finally, here are some more pictures from our Cocktails Friday: