At our house, the Fourth of July isn’t just a celebration of the birth of our nation. It’s also our younger son’s birthday.
Over the years that has meant parties in the yard with slip-n-slides, rented cotton candy and slushy machines, hunts for hidden treasure, rented slushy machines and Super Mario Brothers.
It has also meant spectacular cakes created to match the party “theme” by two family friends who also happened to be Swiss pastry chefs. There were Shamu extravaganzas, pirates and doubloons, baseball diamonds, and even a “Where-in-the-world-is-Carmen-San-Diego creation when that computer game was the rage.
But alas, the cakes, the games and the goody bags are now just happy memories tucked away in photo albums.
This year my son and his friends decided to toast his 25th birthday by drinking the birthday cake.
Here’s how it works.
Fill a shot glass about ¾ full with a 50-50 mix of Frangelico hazelnut liqueur and Absolut Citron vodka (or other lemon-flavored vodka). Cut a large lemon into wedges. Dunk each wedge in a heap of sugar,
preferably coarse sugar.
Then, all together now, belt out Happy Birthday, then belt back the liquor in the shot glass, and suck on the sugary lemon wedge. It’s like a big, fat, gooey slab of chocolate cake smack in your face. And it’s delicious.
Some folks swear they get the chocolate cake taste with the liquor; others say they taste it when they chomp on the lemon. When I prepared the shots for the partiers this weekend, I was bowled over by the chocolate smell as I dipped the wedges in the sugar.
Of course, like any “recipe,” there’s room for experimentation. Some fans say you should suck the lemon before downing the juice. Others want you to lick a bit of sugar off the lemon, hold it in your mouth while you drink the liquor, then bite into the wedge.
When I Googled this popular “interactive shot” (meaning there are several steps and other ingredients involved, as opposed to just slugging a shot of whiskey) I found 868,000 links, including a YouTube “demo” that required 3 minutes and 36 seconds that I didn’t have.
Not a single site explained the “why.”
Maybe there’s an adventurous, vodka-loving scientist out there who can explain it to us.
Deeeeeeeeeeelicious!
Posted by: Boozehound | July 07, 2008 at 08:17 PM