I am obsessed with blood oranges.
I don’t know why, or how this happened. I didn’t eat a lot of blood oranges as a kid, but I am obsessed with them.
So when I came across a punch recipe calling for the use of blood oranges, of course I had to make it, and I tested it on my family at a birthday party. Because what is family good for if not to be used as guinea pigs in your experiments?
This recipe actually required to make two recipes, but was actually ridiculously simple to make. I had to half the recipe, because I wasn’t making punch for THAT many people
easiest recipe ever.
First, I had to make the sour mix. There are a number of different types of sour mixes to make in this book, but the variation I used was the blood orange mix (as required by the punch recipe).
As you can see this required the fresh blood orange juice. Thank goodness I decided to squeeze the blood oranges the night before. It took 45 minutes and was a huge mess – blood colored spattered juice everywhere, including on me. I could have been Carrie’s body double.
Further, it was exhausting. If I’m going to be squeezing oranges en masse in the future, I need a juicer that isn’t mechanical and is electric.
And most aggravatingly at all, 6 lbs of blood oranges yielded – NO JOKE – 2 cups of juice.
45 minutes hard labor and all I got was two lousy cups of juice! To be fair, it was delicious.
The sour mix was basically simple syrup with juice and orange zest. I also had to skip the lemon juice. I only had one lemon, and it was practically mummified, and I wasn’t going out at 1:00 AM to go get new lemons.
I was also supposed to use bourbon, but was out of it (lol) and used regular whiskey instead.
I put the whole thing together in the morning, except for the prosecco, which I’d add when I got to my destination, both to make travel easier and to not kill the bubbles. Prosecco is (basically) champagne without being officially French. It usually tastes better as well (I haven’t enjoyed any champagne I’ve had except the champagne at my cousin’s wedding, which was probably very expensive because it was his WEDDING). Most of the of prosecco I’ve had, though, has been delicious.
Mixture pre-prosecco. the oranges I zested for the sour mix, I sliced up and used as garnish.
I didn’t get to take a picture of the finished product, because I was too busy serving it.
Now, I didn’t have an ice mold to serve this in, and it really needed to be cold, so I added 2 ice cubes to each cup. It also didn’t hurt to be watered down just a bit, because it’s a strong punch. That is obviously to taste. I didn’t want everyone wasted because I wanted birthday cake, so I had to take it easy.
It was a big hit, even though it was a bit strong. I wasn’t sure they’d like it, but my family usually surprises me about stuff like this. This punch will be made again (with bottled blood orange juice!) if I have a big party. I will also use a sweeter Prosecco to help balance out the smokiness of the bourbon/whiskey.
words in scarlet ink 