Tag Archives: contemporary

How to Decorate A Cocktail in Contemporary Ways

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Ever since Smirnoff started pushing the chocolate martini, bartenders have been going wild trying to come up with garnishes for this drink. This has included everything from perching a Hershey’s Kiss at the side of the glass, to frosting the rim with chocolate Jell-O pudding powder to dropping a chocolate covered coffee bean at the bottom of the glass. Some bars, such the Turtle Creek Mansion in Dallas, mold their own chocolates specifically to accompany drinks, such as their white chocolate martini that has a triangle shaped piece of white chocolate drizzled with chocolate as the garnish.

An old trend that has come back involves soaking your own cherries in a liqueur and then use that as a garnish. A chocolate martini in that case could be garnished with a cherry that has been soaked in kirsch or Kahlua; an old fashioned cocktail or martini could be garnished with a cherry that is pickled in dry French vermouth.

Another huge trend is star fruit. It has replaced the kiwi of the garnish “of the moment.” This is an oval tropical fruit that once sliced vertically, concedes a beautiful yellow star shape. This fruit is used to garnish everything from the simplest of martinis to the most foamy of tropical drinks.

As the twenty first century also brought in with it the key word “simplicity” many bartenders are simply dropping a single cranberry, pomegranate seed or blueberry into the bottom of cosmopolitans or Crantinis to give the cocktail a sleek but minimalist look.

A bartender named Kathy Casey at Seattle’s Andaluca bar came up with one of the most creative and elegant garnishes ever to grace a martini. She drops edible gold flakes into the martini to give it a “lava lamp” effect. This is the same stuff that is used for cake decorations.

Another popular trend is to replace the olive with just about any other savory fruit or vegetable imaginable – as long as it is spiced. Long green and yellow beans stuffed with pimento, pickled mushrooms, almonds marinated chili peppers, white pickled asparagus and pickled artichokes are making their appearance as martini garnishes across the country.

Bloody Marys and Bloody Caesars have also had a bit of a makeover, boasting asparagus spears, very long green beans, bunches of tall herbs such as thyme or oregano and vertically cut cucumber strips and carrots as “stirrers” in the drink. This is quite a far cry from the usual celery stick. At some bars, such as the Hoghead McDunna’s in Chicago, some bloody drinks have been practically turned into a meal; guests are served skewers loaded with cheese squares, salami curls, pickles, radishes and multi-colored peppers. Some bars even garnish these drinks with smoked and raw oysters doused in pepper vodka.

Other unusual garnishes include rum drinks that are served with a stick of raw sugar cane, vermouth drinks that are pepped up with a clove stuck into an orange segment or crystallized ginger, and gummy bears and jelly beans that are dropped to the bottom of a glass.

How to Decorate A Cocktail in Traditional Ways

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Decorations for cocktails fall into two categories – the traditional garnishes and the contemporary.

The traditional garnishes for cocktails are maraschino cherries, olives, pearl onions, the celery stick, twists of lemon, lime and orange. Over the decades though, these garnishes have mutated to include everything from exotic fruits to gummy drops to edible flowers.

Skewering different fruits or condiments on a cocktail spear is only one way to garnish a drink. Another method is called frosting. This is where the rim of the glass is wetted and then dipped into crystalline or powdered substance of some kind. The traditional frostings are salt, sugar and powdered sour mix. However as cocktails have evolved both in terms of their presentation and their taste, new and unusual frostings for the rims of glasses have evolved such as cocoa, Jell-O powder and flaked coconut.
The most traditional and simple of garnishes is the orange, lemon or lime twist. This is a wedge of citrus fruit that is simply squished and then dropped in the drink.

A variation of this is the squeeze, in which a lemon or a lime is squeezed gently and then also speared with other fruit such as pineapple on a pick to use as a garnish for the drink. This is a standard garnish for drinks such as the Daiquiri, the gin and tonic or the Cuba Libre.

The green olive stuffed with red pimento is the stand-by garnish for a martini however nowadays you can find stuffed olives and black olives sitting on the rim of the drink. A very traditional garnish for a martini, which is enjoying a comeback, is the black olive that is stuffed with blue cheese and dropped to the bottom of the glass.

When it comes to traditional garnishes cocktails, the maraschino cherry is just as famous as the olive. The maraschino cherry is made from marac or Queen Ann cherries that have had the color leached out of them. The two most readily available are, of course, the red almond-flavored ones and also green, which are sometimes mint-flavored. However in the old days, pickled Queen Ann cherries, both the white and red kind were dropped at the bottom of Old Fashioned and Manhattan cocktails to give them a bit of kick. There is a trend to using sour and fresh Bing cherries in the swanky bars in New York. You can easily make your own “specialty” cherry by simply soaking your favorite type of cherry in some kind of brandy.