Drink and a nosh: Coffee cake cocktail and chocolate bacon truffles

Today was National Beer Day. And National Health Day. Plus, it's National Coffee Cake Day, because everything has to have its day in the sun, apparently. Who lobbied for it, one wonders? The yeast makers, perhaps? Flour companies?

At any rate, I decided in honor of that I would make a coffee cake cocktail. I discovered that unlike many classic drinks of which there are just a few variations on a standard, there is a wide range of recipes calling themselves coffee cake cocktails, many with very little in common other than the fact that they tend toward the sweeter side of the equation.

None of them struck my fancy, so I just decided to assemble a drink based on the components of a good coffee cake, something I know something about.

Coffee cake cocktail

Ingredients

2 ounces vanilla vodka

½ ounce Disaranno (an almond-flavored liqueur)

½ ounce crème de cacao

1 ounce brewed tea, chilled (I used Republic of Tea's Cardamom Cinnamon, brewed strong)

2 dashes orange bitters

1 orange slice

Cinnamon sugar

Method

Put cinnamon sugar on a small plate or bowl. Run the orange slice around the rim of a cocktail glass (or glasses, because this makes either one quite large drink or two smaller ones). Dip cocktail glass rim into the cinnamon sugar to coat.  

Combine vodka, Disaranno, creme de cacao, tea and bitters in an ice-filled cocktail shaker. Shake well and strain into prepared cocktail glass.

Rating: Lovely. Perfectly enjoyable, nicely balanced and very worth repeating, and perfectly captures the flavors of a coffee cake in a cocktail without being overly sweet. It's probably more of an after-dinner cocktail than apres, but sometimes you want one of those.


 

Chocolate bacon truffles
From "Desserts for Two" by Christina Lane

Ingredients: semi-sweet chocolate, cream and bacon, in improbable proportions.
Method: questionable.
Rating: Flavor-wise, they were just fine. It's nice chocolate and bacon, and what's not to like there? If it wasn't for the problem of having to eat them before they turned into a puddle, I wouldn't whine.

Words rarely fail me, but sometimes recipes do. This one failed the all-important structural integrity test, despite faithfully following the recipe exactly as written through the first step where you make the underlying truffle by microwaving cream and adding an apparently woefully inadequate amount of chocolate, despite measuring by weight. After that, when it became abundantly clear I shouldn't trust them, I abandoned the directions and went with common sense about how to make dipping chocolate. That part went fine, but since the first step is key, the die was cast. We had to eat these straight out of the freezer because ice cream has more inherent structure than the cream/chocolate mixture on which these truffles are formed. I won't share the recipe because no one should be led down this path to failure, tasty thought it may be.

But I might give the recipe creator one more chance with these potato-based truffles.

Play along: Since we're in a classical vein after a Minnesota Orchestra performance of Schubert and such, I'm going with something that splits the difference a bit between folk and classical: "Wood Works" by the Danish String Quartet.