the welcome home cocktail

Alright, friends, it’s time to hand the Wholefully reigns over for the afternoon to the amazing and incredibly attractive Babyface. He has a cocktail to share with you all that is totally summer-tastic.

As a part of Cassie’s birthday celebration and our last week as Bloomingtonians, we visited one of our favourite restaurants in Bloomington—FARMBloomington. While it was only our third time eating there, everything about the place appeals to us, and I seriously think it gets better and better every time we go.

What also happens every time we go is we purchase one of their signature cocktails (or two) to sip on throughout our dinners. One of the ones that stuck out on this specific outing was a drink they dubbed the “Pitchfork.” Get it? Stuck out? No?

Moving on, then.

Cass enjoyed this drink so much that she committed the ingredients to memory. And by this, I mean she took a picture of it and had me attempt to recreate the drink since I seem to have become the resident bartender.

So, as part of our first weekend in our new house, I busted out the ingredients (save for one that we didn’t have) and I began concocting. The ingredients they had listed on their menu were gin, lemon juice, champagne, sugar and a brandied cherry, which we unfortunately don’t keep on hand.

Some people recommend that you replace it with a maraschino cherry, but not only are they chocked full of HFCS, they’re soaked in sulfur dioxide (a poisonous gas) and calcium chloride (road salt).

Gross.

Anyways, after one swing and a miss that was alterable, I managed to tweak something that Cass seemed to enjoy and felt was close enough to what she had drank a few nights previous on her birthday, and thus our own “Pitchfork” was unleashed.

Since we don’t know the exact ratio of the ingredients Farm used, we can’t exactly call it the same thing, so I came up with our own name for the recipe I came up with and dubbed it the “Welcome Home.” Seems fitting since we drank it on our first weekend in our new home, right?

The eventual plan is to make a batch of brandied cherries so that we can get even closer to the drink Farm served us, but since that’ll take 6 weeks to accomplish, we’ll drink them sans the fruit for now. But by all means, if you have your own jar of brandied cherries, toss one in the glass and all will be well in the world!

 

What cocktail are you loving this summer?