tea berry-blue

One of my friends spent some time in Sweden a few years ago, and mailed me some KEX. Kex, if you don’t know it, is something like our sugar wafer cookies, but denser, and coated in chocolate. That is the best way to explain it. I loved it! Sometimes I can find it in New York, but not often.

But a couple weeks ago, my friends Aleph and Beth, one of whom is Swedish and both of whom live in Sweden, came to visit the US. I didn’t get to see them, but they made their presence known in the form of a box of delicious candy.

In the box was a bar of Kex, but also several bars of flavored Kex, in blueberry and raspberry, something I’ve never seen, let alone tasted. So I was very excited by this development.

Unwrapping it, you can really smell a whiff of blueberry. It reminds me of smelling something else, too, but I don’t remember exactly what– obviously something else berry-scented. I think it may have been a Dagoba chocolate bar, but I’m not sure. I actually procrastinated on tasting it because I liked smelling it so much!

The flavor of it, while having a hint of blueberry, isn’t actually as distinctive as the scent, which was interesting to me. It tasted a little different from regular Kex, and if I hadn’t known the flavor, I would have known it was some kind of fruit, but I’m not sure blueberry would have occurred to me. Hmm. All in all, though, an exciting gift!!!

Mirrored from Nommable!.

I went to my friend Rina’s house on Thursday, planning on just helping her out with some stuff and then going out to dinner, but when I walked in, she asked if I’d make her a drink. Now, of COURSE I will make her a drink, all the time, as she’s one of my favorite cocktail guinea pigs, but I had all these neat little ingredients I had wanted to show off and I hadn’t brought any of them over. So I worked with what she had in the house. Which is not an unimpressive collection.

Her husband, Brendan, recently acquired a full set of syrups from the new syrup company, Royal Rose, which is in nearby Brooklyn. I had been itching to try them. They also had a bottle of Solerno Blood Orange Liqueur, which I ‘d heard good things about, but never had, and Cocktail Kingdom’s Wormwood Bitters. (Note: Cocktail Kingdom is one of my favorite places to buy bitters. They have lots of awesome small batch stuff that I haven’t found anywhere else).

We tried a little of the Solerno neat, and it was very, very sweet, sweeter than I expected. It tasted kind of like a melted popsicle, but with more depth to it. I’m not so sure I got ‘blood orange’ so much as a brighter orange-tangeriney flavor.

Here’s what I ended up making:

Mirrored from Nommable!.