I have recently prepared a cocktail that combines three of my favourite ingredients.
Some of the best recipes are born this way: you like something but you don’t know how it will taste when mixed together with other ingredients. You try, eventually also fail a few times, before you get something good. In my case the risk involved mixing pears, honey and Prosecco.
I had all the ingredients leftover from New Year’s eve so I could start mixing them without leaving home for shopping. You are not wrong if you consider laziness as an ingredient of this cocktail. Though this approach is not highly professional, it led me many times to make a virtue of necessity with good result.
Discovering flavours
As I was not going to follow a specific recipe I ended up discovering flavours that I would have never tried otherwise. Necessity is the mother of the invention. Not to mention all of the masterpieces born by mistake, a separate chapter should be devoted on these.
I did not know what to expect but a certain intuition about the flavours inspired me to venture. As I wrote in a recent post, Prosecco is an Italian sparkling wine with fruity aroma. Fruit juices are usually used in the preparation of cocktails based on it, see Bellini. A wine with fruity notes goes well with fruit. Elementary, my dear!
If you put together ingredients that are like colours separated by a few tones, few shades, you may assure yourself results at least discrete, sometimes surprisingly excellent. Not the traditional sugar mixed with the usual alcohol.
Prosecco is a versatile drink, with a level of acidity lower than Champagne. The favourite drink for festive occasions in Italy. And not only. With exports rising by 25 percent, most of the toasts will be made in Italy everywhere. This is shown by an analysis of Coldiretti, Organization of Italian farmers, on the basis of market sales in the world in the first nine months of 2011. Coldiretti estimated that over 300 million bottles of made in Italy sparkling wine were consumed during 2011 (10 million more than Champagne), +37 percent in the United States, + 25 percent in the United Kingdom .
Happy Honey Pear cocktail recipe
Let’s forget about market sales now. I always suggest you to follow tastes more than trends. If a trend is so appealing or convenient to capture your attention, take a chance on it just to discover new things and create your future recipes, like I did with this Happy Honey Pear cocktail.
Serves 4:
- Take 3 pears, peel and cut them into pieces (leave some pear for the garnishment if you fancy it)
- Bake them until they are tender, around 20 minutes
- In a food processor mix the pears with honey (2 tablespoons of acacia honey for a delicate sweet taste) and blend until you get a smooth cream
- Slowly add the chilled Prosecco and blend it again
- Freeze at least one hour
- Pour everything into glasses and garnish with thin pear slices.
Fresh, smooth, delicious. Want to try some?
