Squid Mixes: Cinderella

As noted in my State of the Blog 2018 post, mixing mocktails is one of my major goals in the drinks hobby.  During our Europe last summer, our daughter found many delicious beverages, especially in Paris.  It seemed only logical to learn to make them myself.  Christmas brought with it not one, not two but three recipe books to explore.

My Cinderella recipe came from Mocktails: The Complete Bartender's Guide by Kester Thompson: orange juice, pineapple juice, lemon juice, grenadine and soda water or ginger ale with orange and pineapple garnish.  It's our house so obviously, we picked ginger ale.  All three of the books emphasize the importance of fresh juice.  In truth, so do most books for alcoholic cocktails.  Of course, therein lies most of work.

The resulting beverage was, frankly, fantastic.  There's enough sour from the lemon to keep the sweet from overpowering.  Is it worth the work, though?  We have a wonderful lemon squeezer so that's easy.  There's a lot of knife work with the pineapple but then the blender does the hard part.  The labor is in the oranges.  They're too big for the squeezer so I've got to do those by hand.  I needed six in total.  In answer to the question, it is a lot of work for one drink but not bad for three.  A pitcher for a party would be manageable.  Maybe I just need to sort out the orange issue.

A note for the curious: one pineapple yielded about 14 ounces of juice.

I will concede the fresh juice in itself is worth the effort.  Could one make the drink with store bought juices from concentrate?  In a pinch, sure.  But it's the difference between a drink that is good and one that is potentially amazing.  Amazing is worth the work.