A late night boozy snack

My fiancee was out on her own last Sunday night, so I took the opportunity to prepare a snack for her return. The base for my effort was the bottle of blue Sapphire gin I had bought earlier in the day. But gin is the most versatile of liquors, and the range of cocktails one can make with gin is almost limitless. Still, I settled quickly on the Singapore Sling, which has been a sort of inside joke in my family for a long time. (The joke is that my father, who doesn't really drink cocktails, always orders it when it seems like one ought to order a cocktail, and the bartender invariably either doesn't know what it is or doesn't have one of the ingredients or, if he or she is of a certain age, does know what it is but makes a comment about no one having ordered a singapore sling unironically since the mid '60s).


Unfortunately, I didn't have Benedictine, one of the components of the traditional drink, but I decided to substitute cognac. Otherwise, the alcoholic ingredients were these (from left to right, Remy Martin VSOP cognac, Cointreau, grenadine (fake - boo!), Bombay Sapphire gin, and Heerings Cherry Liqueur.



Unfortunately, Singapore Slings also include at least 4 oz. of pineapple juice, and after all the effort to secure a small bottle of Heerings, I thought it was a shame to just pop open the usual tin. However, I also don't own a juicer, so I did the only thing I could think of - whizz up a pineapple in a food processor and pass it through a sieve. This worked fine, though it is a hassle.



Singapore Slings need to be poured into a collins glass full of crushed ice. I had neither, but approximated the crushed ice by putting my normal ice into two ziplocs as an impromptu Lewis Bag and smashing it with my heavy mortar. Voila - Singapore Slings.

This left the snack. But luckily, my cream puff pastry has gotten better over the past year, so I immediately thought of gougeres - roughly speaking, cream puffs with cheese in. I slightly undercooked these due to the hurry I was in, but I thought they were delicious.

In fact, I proudly claimed they were at least as good as the $8 appetizers at Death & Co. My fiancee scrunched up her nose and said, "Aren't they more like the $5 pretzel nuggets?".