My Holiday Cocktail Experiments( and a few Lessons in Balance): A series!!!
I’ve always loved to experiment with food and apparently, I’m learning my way around cocktails too!!!
I’m the kind of person who treats recipes as suggestions, follow them once to get a feel of the logic, and then let my own inspirations take over. More spice here, a thicker consistency there. A different oil, a different herb. For me, food is about curiosity, intuition, and discovering what truly suits your palate.
Until recently, that curiosity stopped at the plate; alcohol had never really made it into that experimental space. It’s always been something to order, pour, or enjoy, but never something to explore. So I decided to change that over the holidays.
With time on my side, I decided to finally treat cocktails the same way I treat food, as something to explore rather than consume. Not as fixed formulas, but as combinations to understand, adjust, and make my own. And so began my holiday cocktail experiments, starting with the mojito.
The Mojito: Simple, Until It Isn’t
Fresh, simple, and surprisingly easy to mess up!
For my first experiments, I used a Fruit Lagoon Cocktail Base: Mojito, paired with fresh mint, white rum, and soda water. Limes were impossible to find at the time, but thankfully, the base had that citrus element covered. What followed were a few variations and trials, adjusting quantities, tasting, pulling back, and trying again. The biggest lesson?
Balance matters more than enthusiasm
The mojito isn’t about drowning everything in mint or overpowering the drink with rum. The real work is finding harmony between the base, the alcohol, and the soda water. Mint, I learnt, works best as a subtle contributor, a garnish and a hint of flavour rather than the main event. Get it right, though, and
…it’s genuinely impressive what a little alcohol, fruit, and fresh herbs can become when they work together…
The goal now is to move from the base and eventually make the mojito from scratch, assuming I finally find limes.
Ingredients I Worked With(This Time)
Not a recipe-just the components that shaped my experiments:
- Mojito base
- White rum
- Soda water
- Fresh mint
The exact quantities shifted with each trial, and that was the point. This was about learning the relationship between the elements, not locking myself into fixed measurements. This is only the beginning; next, I’ll be continuing this series by exploring other cocktails, each with its own personality, lessons, and balance to figure out. But for now, the mojito has earned its place as my entry point into cocktail experimentation.
