All you need is love

Welcome back and thank you for following the blog,

To be honest I’m a bit at a loss of how to do this so bear with me – I’ll get the hang of it! But let me know if there is anything you want to see up here and I’ll do my level best to get it uploaded.

For my first recipe I thought we would start with something accessible, easy to make and big on flavour. 

Valentines day has just been and what’s more synonymous with valentines than strawberries.

I designed a drink that we sold in bottled form on the website as a valentines special and for this I had to make a strawberry syrup. 

Its super easy and has so many uses. You can use it as a cordial for drinking at home with water or pour over some ice cream or of course in a cocktail to give that fruity and sweet flavour.

This is basically a flavoured simple syrup, or as we call it in the trade - gomme.

This is the first stop on your way to expanding your cocktail skills – you can use this same formula for almost any fruit and even dry herbs.

So, take 1 cup, doesn’t matter which size and you will be using this in a 1:1 ratio of water to sugar.

So fill the cup to the top with water and pour that into a pan. Put the heat on and get it to a simmer.

Take 300g of fresh strawberries and take the tops off and discard. Then slice the strawberries into quarters and pop them to simmer water. 

Lightly simmer for 5 mins and then remove from the heat and leave to cool with the strawberries still in the water.

Now get a sieve and strain out the fruit and keep the liquid below. (you can use the left over strawberries as a coulisy over some vanilla ice cream or in a smoothy)

If you can strain this lovely pink strawberry water through a coffee filter to ensure it has no bits in it (might take a few hours or a couple of filters but it’ll be worth it)

Once you have your filtered strawberry water put it back in the original cup and top it back up to a full cup. Then pop it back on the heat and bring to simmer and add 1 cup of caster sugar. Stir and wait for it to dissolve - you should have a glassy, transparent pink strawberry flavoured sweet syrup.

Take it off the heat and leave to cool - bottle it and label it. This will last for 5 or so days in the fridge. 

To make the cocktail –

All You Need Is Love

50ml Gin

50ml strawberry liqueur

25ml sweet vermouth

Put these ingredients into a glass with ice and stir.

Pour it into a wine glass, add some ice and fresh strawberries and enjoy!

Watch this space for more syrups and cocktail ideas and we look forward to seeing you when we are allowed to re-open.

All the very best and take care