This weekend most of us will celebrate Halloween!! The height of the most wonderful time of the year is finally here!! Whether you're having over a couple of friends or a crowd this weekend, here's a few tips and tricks to get your cocktails looking dark and scary. And I'm not even asking for any candy!
Make it GROSS! (EW!)
The easiest way to make Halloween cocktails scary is to make the drink itself appear gross. There are so many options! Bloody Brain Shooters, Zombie Brain Shots and of course the Brain Hemorrhage Shooter. Add extra red to any drink for a bloody effect by using corn syrup tinted with red food coloring, (or strawberry syrup, but it will be thinner than the corn syrup), on the inside of the glass, or as a rim for the glass - you've got to let some of it run down the sides for a true blood effect. You can also use grenadine and red sugar to rim a glass, and if your recipe calls for grenadine, put it into a syringe with the drink as the cocktail stirrer. To make eyeball garnishes, use canned lychees and add a half blueberry to the center with a dab of red gel food coloring. For extra ews, hold it all together with a skewer. An eyeball garnish for a bloody mary, use a radish, add a stuffed, (or a plain), green olive to the center. Make ice cubes with candy spiders and bugs in the center and use gummy worms too. Also, you can decorate a highball or beer glass with gauze for a mummy koozie.
Get DARK!
To blacken cocktails, you can use activated charcoal, however, it settles at the bottom of the glass and might even interfere with some medications according to The Spruce Eats. They suggest a basic food coloring formula or even using black rice to create black vodka.
Sparkle & Shine!!
To add sparkle or shimmer to your cocktail potions, The Mixer suggests using edible cocktail glitter, and for shimmer, use luster dust. They explain exactly how here.
Make it GLOW!
For glow in the dark cocktails, the key ingredient doesn't go in your drink - it's making sure you have black lights. You can enhance the effects and guarantee that glow by using any energy drink containing vitamin B, Mountain Dew, tonic water, or tonic water ice cubes or any of the list of ingredients that ThoughCo suggests. They also mention the type of glass/cup you use, and though they suggest using a glow stick as a cocktail server, I wouldn't - it would be really bad if it leaked.
SA-MOKAYYYYY
The trick to bubbling, foggy potion cocktails is of course dry ice. Just be careful handling it, (like, don't handle it ever - always use a utensil with it). For individual drinks - you don't need much at all. Check out the video below for safety tips. Here are a few places that sell dry ice.
Our cocktail honors Friday the 13th and Halloween, we’re not going to have another one of these in October until 2028… so, I went dark - literally - with the Blackberry Death cocktail
Sugarcane actually dates back to ancient times, with the earliest discovery of sugarcane through Alexander the Great as he made his way through Asia and Africa. Fast forward to the discovery of Barbados, and its perfect climate for sugarcane, they started fermenting sugarcane's by-product molasses - but it didn’t exactly taste great… In the mid 1600’s they called it “kill devil.” It was also an answer to the colonists of New England’s desire for alcohol - they had tried to make alcohol from pretty much everything around them with little success and rum came to the rescue. The taste improved greatly by the early 1700's and we’ve been enjoying it's gloriousness since. Rum was actually the drink of choice of the founding fathers' and our new country's drink of choice.
As for Chambord, it technically launched in the 1980’s - that said, it’s based on a French recipe from the 1600’s from the Chateau Chambord - and was reportedly enjoyed by royalty, specifically, King Louis the XIV, but let’s not focus on what ended up happening to him…
Blackberry Death
2 oz Dark Rum
1 1/2 oz Chambord
1 1/2 oz Blackberry Juice (or Pomegranate)
2 Dashes of Bitters
Club Soda
Add Rum, Chambord, Juice and bitters to a shaker with ice; shake until well chilled and strain into a glass over ice. Top with Club Soda and enjoy - preferably away from mirrors or under ladders…