Salted Caramel Cocktail
As I wind down the holidays – the chaos and indulgent eating, I had a bit of leftover homemade caramel on my hands. Before I jump on the bandwagon of healthy eating with the new year, quickly followed by me falling of said wagon two weeks later, I decided to use the caramel in a sweet drink. While I tend toward herbaceous cocktails or mildly sweet ones; every now and then I like something sweeter. I also have my smoked bourbon salt and the combo of it with caramel kept running on a loop in my head.
I had a couple of ideas floating around in my head. Would I use cream? Would the caramel provide enough sweetness, or would I need something else? Long and short – the milk added a heaviness that wasn’t too much. The caramel lone didn’t provide enough umph, though I will say I did have thoughts of caramel apples in my mind as I drank one of the iterations.
I never get a pretty rim on my cocktails, but they taste great nonetheless.
Finally, I settled on a brown sugar simple syrup with a couple of pinches of smoked salt. I like the subtle molasses flavor of brown sugar simple syrup, there’s depth to it, though it can become cloyingly sweet if used too much in a drink. The salt balanced out the sweetness in a nice way and gave the drink an even mouth feel and the caramel brought out the toffee notes in the bourbon. Win!
This was a good not great cocktail. My friends who love sweet drinks said it was tasty, but I couldn’t drink more than one and switched to an Old Fashioned – tried and true.
*I tried the drink with store bought caramel – fine and definitely less fuss than homemade.
*I tried smoking the cocktail and it was too much. It didn’t add anything to the taste in a complimentary way. Just smokey.
Cheers,
~Kimberly Elise
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