Say one thing about me, say I love chocolate. I’ll happily take it in chip form, bars, hunks, milks, cookies, you get the idea. When I can get it in cocktail form, then I am quite the happy camper. There’s even a rumor — nay, a legend — that every time I go to Vegas (something I try to do at least twice a year), I like to start every day with a Chocolate Martini. What about the end of the night? What about when it’s time to settle down with something in the bourbon family? We have the Chocolate Maple Pecan Cocktail for that!

Chocolate? Check.

Maple? Check.

Pecan? Check.

Bourbon? You can double check that.

What I’m saying here is that this is the best chocolate pecan pie you’ve ever had, but in drink form! Oh, and less cloyingly sweet. (Not that there’s anything wrong with a pecan pie, but that’s why you add the bittersweet chocolate in there to cut that extra super, duper sweetness.)

I’ll break down how my thinking went.

“Man, the holidays came and went again, and I didn’t get a single slice of pecan pie. I don’t want to bake an entire pie just for me because then I’ll eat an entire pie. Let’s see if we can’t make a drink out of that.”

And ta da!

With this recipe, I used pecan-infused bourbon. There are two ways to going about this, you can take pecans and bourbon, stick them in a jar, stick said jar in a cool dark spot, and in two weeks you’ll have pecan-infused bourbon. It’s not a difficult proposition, it’ll just take you fourteen long days of waiting.

Or, you can do what I did: infuse it with a cream whipper for a rapid infusion. This works great if you have a cream whipper (the kind you stick nitrous on; it’s not just for going faster). In that case, you take your pecans, you take your bourbon, pop them in your cream whipper, close it, add the nitrous, swirl for 30 seconds, let sit for two minutes, de-gas it, then pour and strain out your final liquid. Total time about four minutes.

It’s up to you, both methods work great, but it’s a difference of fourteen days vs. four minutes. If you don’t already have a cream whipper, this is the perfect excuse to get one.

Now, with our pecan bourbon, we add some maple syrup (the darker, richer, tastier, the better), some dark crème de cacao, and a little chocolate bitters. Yes, a damn fine after dinner drink if ever there was one.

Now, onto the Chocolate Maple Pecan Cocktail!

 

January 19th, 2018 | by morgan