craft cocktails - A Tipsy Giraffe

The Cranberry Martini is a sweet and slightly tart festive cocktail, made with a homemade cranberry shrub to give it a little bit of zing. This Cranberry Martini, Crantini if you will, is an easy and delicious cocktail to serve over the holidays, with only a few ingredients needed you can’t go wrong. I also give you my recipe for a super simple cranberry shrub (aka drinking vinegar), a great cocktail ingredient that will take your Cranberry Martini to the next level – spoiler alert: it’s REALLY easy to make at home and makes a great gift too!

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Can you believe it’s almost Christmas time?! Where has the year gone? I swear, the older you get the faster the time goes by! The calendar doesn’t lie though, so it’s definitely time to start getting ready for the holidays! And I don’t know about you, but I need a few festive cocktails to get my Christmas spirit going – this Cranberry Martini is perfect for that! Cranberries are wonderful this time of year, and certainly not just for Thanksgiving! Here in the UK we don’t have Thanksgiving, so the turkey and all things cranberry are reserved for Christmas. Besides, you cannot deny how festive the colour of this Cranberry Martini is – it’s totally going to get you into the Christmas spirit just by looking at it!

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The Mulberry Bramble Cocktail is full of amazing flavours and stunning colours. Made with mulberry gin, lemon juice, and blackberry liqueur, it’s really easy to mix, making it the perfect cocktail to serve at any occasion. It is fully of early autumn flavours, but can be enjoyed any time of year.

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Mulberries are something that have always intrigued me. When we were little we would sing about dancing around a mulberry bush on a “cold and frosty morning”. In the myth of Pyramus and Thisbé, they meet (and later die) under a mulberry tree and that’s where the berries get their colour from (to memorialize their forbidden love or something vindictive and weird like that). So, do they grow on a bush that you dance around, or a tree that you have a violent death under? Who knows! (Probably botanists and people who can be bothered to use google). All I know is that I’d never actually tasted this sweet berry or seen them in real life. So my interest was piqued when I came across Mulberry Gin during a visit to Coughton Court (a National Trust site). I decided to snap up a small bottle, despite being on a self-imposed ban on buying any spirits or liqueurs for a month! Totally worth it, because this Mulberry Bramble Cocktail was born from it – and there ain’t nothing wrong with his baby!

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