Welcome To Wonkette Happy Hour, With This Week's Cocktail, The Witch's Night In!

In which your bartender barely makes his deadline.

A drink this innocent-looking shouldn’t cause so much heartache.

Greetings, Wonketeers! I’m Hooper, your bartender. Normally, right about now, I would be writing about how to make a nice, relaxing cocktail after an entirely too exciting news week. But not today. Today, I’m typing away furiously, well past my self-appointed deadline, with the tale of a cocktail that went wrong and how I righted it with swear words and a last-minute shopping trip to Hell. Let’s make a Witch’s Night In. Here’s the recipe:

Witch’s Night In

1 ½ oz Amaretto di Saronno (40 proof)

½ oz Weller Special Reserve Bourbon

½ oz lemon juice

1 oz honey syrup

Apple cider

Heavy whipping cream

Add all ingredients but the cream and cider to your serving glass. Add cider to the glass, leaving 1 inch of room for cream at the top. Microwave the drink for 30 seconds. Gently whip the cream and pour onto the top of the cocktail. Garnish with a light sprinkle of cinnamon. 

Sounds pretty innocent — a warm dessert-style cocktail, perfect for sitting on the front stoop waiting for trick-or-treaters. But that’s not the recipe I started with. My initial recipe, courtesy of a magazine staffer who shall remain nameless, went something like this:

Hag’s Brew

1 ½ oz bourbon

½ oz walnut liquor

½ oz lemon juice

1 oz simple syrup

Heat all ingredients. Garnish with a cinnamon stick and serve.

I should know better than to trust anonymous magazine staffers when it comes to cocktails. But the basic flavors sounded great. Plus, I’ve got a jet-black bottle of nocino in the liquor cabinet I could use up. I could write about black cocktails, and how coloring drinks black has its own challenges. Easy layup, right?

However, one whiff of the Hag’s Brew told me that I’d made a huge mistake. This cocktail was mostly bourbon. Heating bourbon — or any liquor, for that matter — brings the ethanol front and center. The gentle, mellow wheated bourbon I’d picked up for this recipe now reeked of alcohol. It was literally undrinkable. You couldn’t bring your nose to the glass. 

Fiddling with the ratios in the drink didn’t improve things much. Eventually, I realized that the magazine author had been trying to write a hot toddy recipe, but had omitted the hot water. A good hot toddy needs to be diluted quite a bit to be tasty. Hot water is traditional, but I like using tea or cider as the season permits. The omission was glaring. 

Having added the missing ingredient, I discovered another problem: My black cocktail wasn’t black anymore. Nocino is quite dark, but adding cider to the walnut liquor produced something that looked like mud. I’d have to find another way to make this drink black. 

Using a dark liquor is the best way to produce a black cocktail. There are other ways to do it, but they have their own problems. For a while, activated charcoal was the favorite tool for mixologists wanting to make something dark. It’s tasteless, odorless, and exotic-sounding. But it fell out of favor quickly when bartenders realized it could absorb medication in a customer’s digestive system. Undoing a drinker’s blood pressure medication over the course of an evening is a bad idea. Squid ink is another option, but, well, it’s squid ink. The only other route was to use black food coloring. I hate using artificial ingredients, but I was out of ideas. 

As long as I wasn’t using nocino for color, there was no reason not to swap the walnut liquor for approachable, low-proof amaretto. That would transform the drink into a warm Godfather sour, a recipe I knew would work. Visiting the liquor store garnered me the amaretto and more lemons, but I had no luck finding black food coloring. There was only one place left to search on a Thursday night in my small town:

Hobby Lobby. 

Fifteen minutes later, clutching a bottle of black food dye in a “craft store” crammed with Christmas geegaws, utterly bereft of anything resembling Halloween, watching an elderly woman painstakingly pull seventeen buttons out of her shopping cart one by one, I realized I would no longer be writing an article about black cocktails and left the food dye on a shelf. Instead it would be this. 

Let’s talk ingredients while I sip on a different, much stiffer drink:

Ingredient shot. I forgot to photograph the apple cider. Pretend there’s a bottle of apple cider in the picture, please. Oy, I need a drink.

Amaretto di Saronno: You can purchase Amaretto di Saronno in a low proof and a high proof version; the difference between the two is fairly marginal, 20 percent alcohol vs. 28 percent. I went with the lower proof, because painful experience taught me high alcohol content did this drink no favors. It’s worth noting that Amaretto is made from stone fruit pits, not almonds, so it’s theoretically allergen safe. 

Weller Special Reserve Bourbon: This wheated bourbon is a welcome treat that isn’t always available in Ohio. This is probably my favorite ingredient in the glass. A wheated bourbon is a whiskey that uses wheat as well as corn in the mash; they’re generally mellower than pure corn bourbon. 

Lemon Juice: Just enough to provide acid to the drink. Use fresh, even when under duress. 

Honey Syrup: 50/50 honey and water. Heat until diluted. Pure honey seizes up into a lump at the bottom of a cocktail. This replaces the simple syrup in the Hag’s Brew; I always swap out sugar syrup for something more flavorful in a recipe, and almonds and honey go together too well to ignore.

Apple Cider: Use fresh, use local, and don’t use apple juice. This was literally, painfully, the secret ingredient in this cocktail.

Whipped Cream: Here’s a nifty bartender’s trick to make whipped cream for drinks: Pour a little cream into a plastic squeeze bottle. Pry the spring off your cocktail strainer and toss it in the bottle as well. Put the lid on, put your finger over the squeeze bottle nozzle, and shake for 15 seconds. You’ll have soft whipped cream that won’t form peaks, but will sit on top of the drink nicely. 

In summary and conclusion, drink well, drink often, and tip your bartender — donate to Wonkette at the link below!  

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