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Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Tangle Twister Daiquiri


Let's skip the bit where I analyse my life and point out how a man of my age needs to get a drivers licence, tax, insurance, a mortgage, a strimmer, an Xtra-vision card and a collection of hobbies that don't involve making alcoholic versions of my favourite childhood ice pops. Those boats have sailed. When I'm faced with a Monday evening on my own in early September in a landlocked county in Ireland this is the type of shit that's gonna go down.

Tangle Twisters.
I won't now, never have and may God strike me down if I ever do drop the 'Tangle' from this, the most wonderful Twister, as much as HB would like me, and the rest of us, to. Because, by Jaysus, you'll be fairly Tangled after this Twister I can tell you. Ha... Haha.. No?.. Sorry, I've drink in me.

I'd been thinking about my next cocktail move after my Jägerbomb Ice Cream and decided that instead of ice creaming up a drink, I'd alcohol up an ice cream. If you get me? You do. Grand. We'll move on.

Well we'll move back a little bit first I suppose, a bit of history...
I first encountered a Daiquiri, a strawberry one to be exact, while on a skiing trip with my friends Ciarán and Rob in New Hampshire in late 2005. We were staying in a motel 5 miles from the middle of fuck all and quickly realised the place up the road, The Indian Head, had much better facilities than the ones we were living in. Every night after we'd left the slopes (the variety of slopes I was sticking to weren't unlike those of The Curragh Plains) we'd head up the road to The Head, shoot some pool (as they say in The States), drink beer and inevitably I'd get the notion to get a cocktail.
Even though this was the time of the Celtic Tiger and we were all going around wiping our arses with pesto laden half pounders and lighting our farts with tenners, Strawberry Daiquiris weren't the everyday feature of the Irish pub/club cocktail menu that they are now. This was all brand new to me and I was in love, I didn't care that they weren't cool or manly, I wanted an alcoholic slush puppy to go with the bottle of piss American beer I was thoroughly enjoying.

Which brings me back (or forward, I'm remarkably confused) to the Tangle Twister. A tube of frozen Strawberry (the best fruit) spectacularness, wrapped in a load of  pineapple (the 2nd best fruit) ice cream and pear (the somewhere between 3rd and 7th best fruit, my ranking system is in its early days) icepop.
Every ingredient here is a prime candidate for daiquiri-ing.


After much thought and consideration I decided this set of ingredients and tools would serve me best; fresh strawberries, tinned pears and pineapples(just to avoid the hardship of pealing those pricks), a hand blender and a few other bits. And of course the obligatory Rum.


The first thing I did was pour a large rum and coke just to make sure the Bacardi hadn't gone off, it hadn't, then I  trimmed the hedges off most of the strawberries and threw them into the blender.


I topped them off with some caster sugar and 3 measures of Bacardi rum (that may have been excessive) and blended it all up till it looked like something you'd find in a butchers drain.

Nice.

Contents poured into a plastic container and ready for freezing I moved on to the pear tangle.


This time into the blender went a couple of tinned pear halves (with some juice), a fair aul swig of a decent pear cider, 2 measures of rum, another dose of sugar and a lob of green food colouring to bring it up to a shade that would bring a tear of joy to Derek Warfield's eye.


Do as with the strawberry solution...


The next job is is to make some soft serve pineapple ice cream. 


I let some vanilla ice cream melt a bit then I added in 3 rings of tinned pineapple along with some of the juice (I had planned to buy some cream for this part but I got distracted in the shop), then I thought I might as well fire a couple of measures of rum into the ice cream as well because, sure, you know, fuck it, we're partying now lads.

I should mention that I tasted everything immediately after blending to see if I got the balance of ingredients right. More rum was the general consensus. 

Now in the interest of "waste not, want not" I decided to soak some of the remaining fruit in a combination of rum and pear cider for a little while.


I then drained off the excess alcohol and put the 4 containers in the freezer for a couple of hours...


The excess fruity cider rum combo I drained off from the fruit made a nice little appetizer for the main event / reward for all my hard work thus far...


I sipped away on this along with most of a bottle of cider and a rum and coke and the following 2 hours passed by in what seemed like a flash...


I got lucky with the timing, they were solid but hadn't turned into cement-like blocks of ice. I gave each 10 seconds in the microwave and they were easy to mush up with a spoon without going too watery.


I used one of these icing syringes (which I duly broke in the process) to dispense the ice cream layers. 


The pear and strawberry layers were layered in with a spoon.



Serve with a side of rum and cider infused frozen fruit and you're all set. Spoon or straw, it's your choice. Not suitable for children or adults with any responsibilities... Each of these contained about 3 and a half shots of rum not including the alcohol suspended in the veins of the frozen fruit, the double measure in the coke, the majority of the large bottle of cider and the rum/cider/fruit juice bonus cocktail... so be careful, no driving, don't even watch a Fast and Furious film after this.  
Good Night.

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B.S.