Williams Winter Wonderland Cocktail

I love a good cocktail and this one is just perfect for the Holiday Season. Whether your having a party or just decorating the tree this cocktail will not disappoint!

Cocktail Hour - Candied Bacon Martini

I figure we should start this new segment off with a bang. Blending cocktails into a food blog is not too difficult a task but when you add bacon to it, it really makes it simple.

This Candied Bacon Martini is going to take a little time, but it would be a great WOW-factor at your next party and the time-consuming part (baking the bacon) can be done ahead of time.

I will warn you, this is a very sweet cocktail without the bacon but when you add the bacon...whoa mama! The salty and smokiness of the bacon totally off-sets the sweetness from the maple syrup in the cocktail. If you're really not into sweet cocktails (we'll be added some for you soon), just add a little more apple brandy to the shaker.

The bacon is candied by coating it in brown sugar and baking it. The recipe calls for 2 strips of bacon per cocktail and I totally shorted us and only gave us 1/2 a strip each. We both wished we'd had at least a whole strip a piece, so don't skimp on the bacon.

We baked our sugar-coated bacon for about 15-17 minutes. It did get a shiny hard-candied shell on the bacon but the pictures didn't really pick that up. Make sure you coat it good in the sugar because a lot doesn't melt off. You should also be sure to cover your pan in foil because burnt sugar will ruin your pan.

The flavor of this cocktail was amazing and it was really a lot of fun to make and drink! I'd even serve it with a meal that had smoked bacon in it or any sort of smoked food. Hope you'll give this a try and let me know what you think!

Building a Home Bar - Liquor

Photo Credit

Both The Other Williams and I are drinkers. My preference is wine and The Other Williams prefers craft beer. Recently, though, we've been trying to build our home bar.

Both of us enjoy a cocktail on occasion and the more we entertain the more we like being able to mix our friends their favorite drink. As for us, I'm a Crown and Coke kind-a-girl from waaaaay back. When questioned about her go-to liquor drink, The Other Williams said "Beer with a shot of bourbon". Yea, up until now we've been pretty simple liquor drinkers.

Lately, we've slowly been purchasing a bottle of fine spirits here and there in the attempt to "stock" our bar. The end-goal is to create 5 cocktails that are our "House Drinks" and always have those ingredients on hand. However right now we're in the development stage and having a little too much fun experimenting with several different types of liquor. We're quickly realizing the challenge of stocking a home bar is keeping it stocked!

So here is our temporary bar set-up.