Halloween Cocktails

Throwing a Halloween party next weekend? Then you need lots of food and drink that matches the theme of the season.
link to some recipes for Halloween Cocktails on a website called Beer Liquors. You will find some interesting drinks with names like:

• Bloody Eyeball Martinis (you scrape a radish, leaving red striations for the veins of the “eyeball”)
• Buffy’s Vampire Juice (vodka with cranberry and apple juice)
• The Brain Hemorrhage (peach liqueur, Irsh cream, grenadine)
• The Tequila Ghost (tequila with pernod, lemon juice & club soda)

There are also recipes for my two favorite brand-name vodkas: Blavod black vodka and Vampire red vodka. The Vampire Vodka recipe is for something called the Vampyre’s Kiss (Vermouth, Vampire vodka, and a cherry).

Blavod has its own website here, where you can find their own drink recipes. Unfortuantely, the site seems to have undergone a redesign since last I looked: although you can find pictures of a Halloween party they held in London four years ago, the Halloween-oriented drinks are nowhere to be found on their drink ideas page. (They do have an external link to addtional recipes, where you can learn to make something called “Blackula,” basically a Bloody Mary with Blavod’s black vodka.)

Since you can’t find Blavod’s Halloween recipes on their website, I’ll provide them to you here. I should perhaps mention that I originally found them in an October issue of Marth Stewart’s Living magazine a couple years ago. (Shameless plug: each year’s October issue of Living is filled with wonderful Halloween ideas for costumes, decorations, food, and drinks.) Anyway, here are the recipes:

• Ghost in the Graveyard: 2 ounces of Blavod black vodka, 2 ounces of creme de cacao or coffee liqueur, 1 scoop ov vanilla ice cream, pinch of nutmeg. Pour Blavod and liqueur into a large glass (preferably a dessert-type glass). Float the scoop of ice cream in the liquid and sprinkle the nutmeg on top. This is a strong one!
• Berry Scary Martini: 1 cup crushed ice, 1 ounce Blavod black vodka, 2 ounces cherry juice (Grenadine does fine), and berries for garnish (some combination of blue, black and/or raspberries). Normally, you mix a martini in a shaker (“shaken, not stirred”) with the ice and then drain the liquid into a glass, so that the ice does not dilute the drink. However, this one is so sweet that it probably helps to leave the idea in the drink, so I just pour the liquor into a martini glass, add the ice, and float a few berries on top.
• Screwy Screwdriver: one-quarter cup ice, one-half cup orange juice, 1-1/2 ounce Blavod black vodka, 1 licorice stick with ends cut off (for a straw). This is basically a traditional screwdrive, simply made with Blavod, which darkens the appearance. Put the ice in the glass first, then the orange juice, then float the vodka on top for a layered effect. The original recipe calls for a black licorice stick, but a red one works just as well (using either one for a straw definitely sweetens the taste of the drink). Also, I’ve found that this drink works even better when you use the red Vampire vodka instead of Blavod; the red vodka and the orange juice are very appealing together visually.

If that’s not enough for you, check out Vampire.Com (“welcome to the world of vampires”), which also uses the url www.vampirewine.com. It’s a sort of portal for the company’s products, with links for Vampire Vodka, Vampire Vineyards, and the Vampire Store. (Warning: the vodka sub-domain is a pain to navigate, because your cursor turns into the company logo.)

Happy Halloween!