Nine ladies dancing!

innocent12daystitle
innocent12days

That’s the day of the 12 days of Christmas assigned to me by Innocent Drinks – the 9th day…which happens to be today. I was one of the 12 bloggers invited to develop a mocktail (that’s a non-alcoholic cocktail if you’ve never come across it before!) using one or more of their juice range. To help, they even sent over a very nice box of mocktail making goodies for inspiration and a supermarket voucher to go get my ingredients.

Innocent Drinks Inspiration Box

I had nine ladies dancing to use as inspiration. Immediately, I thought of Christmas parties and after dinner discos and the need of a refreshing drink to quench one’s thirst. And how appropriate for me too – I don’t drink alcohol and much prefer a mocktail!

Christmas, Christmas, I love Christmas markets! A drink I associate with Germany, land of amazing Christmas markets, is apfelschorle – a 50:50 mixture of apple juice and sparkling water. I reckon it would be just what nine ladies dancing require to wet their whistle.

It was time to jazz up apfelschorle into something a bit more festive though – a bit of rosemary and lime would do the trick. And here’s the mocktail I ended up with after lots of happy testing: An Apple-Rosemary Refresher.

Innocent has turned it into a beautiful recipe card (pdf) that can be downloaded by clicking on the photo below.

recipe

Otherwise, here’s the recipe again:

An Apple-Rosemary Refresher
serves 1-2.

For the rosemary syrup:
125ml water
60ml sugar
3-4 sprigs rosemary

100ml Innocent apple juice
100ml sparkling water
5ml lime juice
ice

First make the rosemary syrup. Put the syrup ingredients in a small pot and place over medium heat, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Bring slowly to a boil and then turn off the heat and let cool.

Mix together 30ml of the syrup with the rest of the ingredients (except the ice). Pour over ice and serve.

All 12 days of Christmas mocktails will be made into a pdf booklet and I’ll link to it here after all days are complete. Thank you very much, Innocent Drinks, for this – it was fun to come up with a new mocktail recipe!