Cam Dickson of Ritual House’s apple bourbon cocktail take on the “Ten lords-a-leaping” verse of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” could be called “Ten tipplers tippling”. There’s a lot of bourbon in it. The beautiful garnish is a ten-apple fan, calling to mind the regality of lords, whether they’re leaping or sleeping. There are lots of opportunities to get creative with this apple bourbon cocktail with swirl designs in the foam and the garnish fan, which Cam explains how to achieve below.
Why are There Ten Lords A-Leaping in “The Twelve Days of Christmas”?
At the end of “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” there’s an abrupt shift from bird gifts to…people gifts? If you sit down and think about it, the last couple gifts aren’t really gifts at all. Milkmaids? Ladies? Lords? Perhaps it makes more sense to imagine them as guests at a party. Really, five golden rings are the only thing in the song that one could feasibly receive as a gift. Some say it’s a reference to the Ten Commandments. But “The Twelve Days of Christmas” originated as a French folk song in the 1700s, so one can imagine after a night of heavy drinking (perhaps not on an apple bourbon cocktail, but something strong all the same), the bard just began to riff.
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Ten Lords A-Leaping Apple Bourbon Cocktail
Description
Get creative with the garnish on this bourbon-forward cocktail!
Ingredients
For the cocktail:
- 2 oz bourbon
- 1.5 oz apple juice
- 1.5 oz fresh squeezed lemon juice
- .75 oz Demerara syrup
- 1 egg white
- 1 Dash Angostura bitters, for garnish
For the Demerara syrup:
- 2 parts raw Demerara sugar, or light brown sugar
- 1 part water
Instructions
For the cocktail and garnish:
- Combine all ingredients in a shaking tin, add ice and give a quick hard shake for ~10 seconds. Strain the cocktail back into the small end of your tin, discard the shaken ice, and then dry shake the cocktail hard for ~20-30 seconds. The dry shake will make the foam of the egg white nice and stiff. Strain again into glass.
- Garnish with a drop of Angostura bitters into the foam, which you can swirl around with a straw or cocktail pick to make a cute latte art-esque design.
- The two garnish options I have for you are a 10 apple slice apple-fan, which you can achieve by cutting 1/8th of an inch into the cheek of an apple then making thin slices, skewering, and fanning out the apple slices. The other garnish is an orange peel, which was achieved by taking a wide Y-peel of an orange, then cutting out a head and feet and a whole in the chest to sit the garnish on the glass.
- When you take your Y peeler, you’ll want to apply a lot of pressure on the orange to keep the cut as wide as possible, otherwise the curve of the orange might give you an uneven size towards the bottom. Before you make your cuts, you’ll want to clean up the edges to give yourself a square peel to start with.
For the Demerara syrup:
- This takes 5 minutes and can be eyeballed or measured with tablespoons or measurement tools most people should have in their kitchen.
- If the reader is really in a pinch, the simple syrup could be made in the microwave by covering with plastic wrap and stirring every 2 minutes of heating until all is dissolved. Keeps for a month in the fridge after it’s finished.
Check out the rest of our “Twelve Days of Christmas” cocktails or make the whole set!
Recipe by Cam Dickson of Ritual House
Styling by Anna Franklin
Photography by Laura Petrilla
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