The 12 Cocktails of Christmas, Day 12: The ‘Grandma Molly’
Recipes inspired by global craft cocktail culture, shared this holiday season by Melissa Rayworth and Ted Anthony.
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This year, in lieu of the holiday card we didn’t have time to create, we welcome you to The 12 Cocktails of Christmas — a dozen recipes and thoughts on what makes them work. With today’s final installment, we admit that we got done right after Christmas, but our schedules have been pretty crazed with new job adventures, current job obligations, two teenagers, two cats — the list, just like yours, goes on.
Hope this brings you all some holiday cheer. Please do share these recipes with your friends and family, and please take a moment this year to raise a glass — no matter what it may hold — to one another and to all the adventures and good things ahead in 2020.
Happy holidays,
THE 12th COCKTAIL OF CHRISTMAS: The ‘Grandma Molly’
Melissa’s maternal grandmother, Mary Celina “Molly” Farrell, had a very interesting early life. The daughter of a saloonkeeper in Brooklyn, Jim Farrell (no relation to the current Farrell’s Bar in Park Slope), she grew up in an apartment above the barroom in the first years of the 20th century. She wasn’t allowed downstairs, so she’d sit at the top of the staircase and listen to the male patrons gulp their whiskey and serve up their corned beef and cabbage at the steam table. We often picture her there, hearing the voices and wondering, and we thought our final edition of the 12 Cocktails of Christmas — a riff on Bailey’s Irish Cream — deserved her name.
“Wait,” you say. “You named it after her just for this?” Well, yes. While the first 11 cocktails we offered up to you have existed for a while, and were concocted by Melissa and Ted over the past two years, this one was invented today — mere minutes before this post — as a holiday drink that you can keep in the fridge and that will sustain you during the short and chilly days between Christmas and New Year’s.
We owe some credit to Bailey’s, the gold standard for this kind of creamy stuff, and some to Eric Prum and Josh Williams, whose lovely book Infuse and its companion, Shake, have inspired us as we try to invent new, weird things that taste good.
While original recipes for Irish cream call for, well, Irish whiskey, we wanted to go a slightly different route. We wanted something wintry and dark but also with a whiff of the exotic. So we actually ventured outside of the brown-liquor family entirely.
We took one of our favorite easy infusions — cheap vanilla vodka infused for four days with cut-up mission figs and crushed green cardamom pods — and used it as a base liquor, adding it to the cream and condensed milk and the coffee that gives the drink the nonalcoholic part of its punch. We also used vanilla paste, which we find offers a more intense vanilla flavor than the slightly chemical taste of supermarket vanilla extract (which will certainly work in a pinch).
As a backup, in case the combination was gross, we made a second Mason jarful using coffee bourbon from the wonderful Litchfield Distillery in Connecticut.
We needn’t have worried. Both batches turned out great — creamy, flavorful, indulgent. But while the coffee-bourbon edition was predictably pleasing, the jar made with fig-cardamom vodka made it into our little plastic file box as something we’ll return to again and again — and something that will pull us back to those days when Molly Farrell, later Molly Rayworth or simply “Gram,” was sitting at the top of the stairs, wishing she might join in the hubbub below.
‘GRANDMA MOLLY’
4.5 oz. fig/cardamom-infused vanilla vodka (any whiskey will also do)
4. oz. heavy cream
4 oz. sweetened condensed milk
1.5 oz. strong black coffee, unflavored
1 tsp unsweetened cocoa
¾ tsp vanilla paste (alternatively, add vanilla extract to taste; use sparingly)In 16-ounce Mason jar, combine all ingredients except liquor and coffee. Then, quickly (to prevent curdling) add liquor and coffee, close jar and shake vigorously for 30 seconds. Refrigerate mixture for at least 2½ hours.
Serve in small, stemless glasses. One Mason jar will yield six to eight servings. Mixture will keep for about two weeks in the refrigerator — well past New Year’s Day.
WHY WE LIKED THIS ONE: The fig and cardamom from the infusion worked really nicely with the creaminess of the dairy products to produce a taste we’d never experienced before — at once dark, fruity and creamy, almost like a pudding Ted once tasted in Afghanistan and never forgot. This one manages to be both familiar and eye-openingly exotic, as if our own living room had somehow sailed to a distant shore, a la “Where the Wild Things Are.” It’s a drink and a dessert all at once, but never loses its grown-up identity.
Previous libations in this series:
- The First Cocktail of Christmas: “Opening Day”
- The Second Cocktail of Christmas: “Afternoon Delight”
- The Third Cocktail of Christmas: “Subourbon Oasis”
- The Fourth Cocktail of Christmas: “The Phipps Conservatory”
- The Fifth Cocktail of Christmas: “The Sour Spice”
- The Sixth Cocktail of Christmas: “The Dark Horse”
- The Seventh Cocktail of Christmas: “Pop Culture Books Night”
- The Eighth Cocktail of Christmas: “The Everything Bagel”
- The Ninth Cocktail of Christmas: “The Loopy Fruit”
- The 10th Cocktail of Christmas: “It’s Alive!”
- The 11th Cocktail of Christmas: “The True North”
- The entire story and collected cocktails.
The same motivation that led us to these drinks led Melissa to do these stories while we were living in Thailand. Check them out:
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©2019, Melissa Rayworth and Ted Anthony. All rights reserved.
