Birthday Treats (and a whiskey sour recipe)

plus a handy table for all your whiskey sour needs!

What I’m reading: my fave Wendy Cope poem (below) - no books this week, too much fun to be had!

What I’m listening to: this Dyed Green podcast with Ciara O hArtghaile of Ursa Minor. I’m a big fan of both Ciara and her wonderful bakery with Dara in Ballycastle, and in this podcast she discusses sourdough baking, food culture in the North, and being a mother and small business owner

What I’m eating: a lot of great food in Perth. Plenty of açai bowls, pastries, avo toast, and excellent coffee - big highlight was these sandwiches at Peggy’s, Fremantle

Peggy’s, Fremantle (aubergine parm and Reuben sandwiches)

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I’ve spent the last 10 days in Perth, Western Australia, visiting my twin brother who lives and works here. I arrived the day before our 27th birthday, just in time to make a birthday cake, which is my favourite thing to do on my birthday (no sarcasm intended - I love any excuse to get out the multicoloured sprinkles). It’s been a wonderful trip - skydiving over Rottnest Island, wine tours down south in Margaret River, plenty of sea swims and visiting as many bakeries and cafes as humanly possible (the coffee here is consistently excellent).

I’m a big believer in little treats - particularly during your birthday week (and even more so when you’ve flown across the world to celebrate with your twin). Ideally, I will fill the days surrounding my birthday with my favourite little treats: over-priced takeaway coffee (short Americano, or long black as they would say here in Aus), ice-cream of all kinds (particularly anything choc), sea swims, Diet Coke, hot water bottles, new books (paperback instead of on my Kindle), almond croissants - and my favourite cocktail, which happens to be whiskey sours.

I love whiskey sours so much that at the pre-drinks I hosted for our Ballymaloe Christmas staff party (January 2023), I decided to make them for everyone. The first ones came out perfectly, and the first four or five guests got immaculate, well-poured cocktails. Half an hour later though, my whiskey sours started to deteriorate. I tried to eyeball quantities, I overfilled the shaker, resulting in an explosion of Angostura bitters, and I ran out of ice. By the time we left the cabin, a bottle of whiskey down and very merry, I swore to myself that I would perfect my whiskey sour formula to avoid disgruntled guests and sticky floors. Here’s a recipe for a quite lovely whiskey sour, followed by a handy little formula and table that you can use to adapt to your vessel size.

Recipe: Whiskey Sour

Ingredients

(makes one generous whiskey sour, in a 200ml glass)

2 part whiskey

1 part lemon juice, strained

¾ part sugar syrup (see notes below)

¾ part egg white

4 dashes Angostura bitters

Method

1. First, pick your glass. I visited the bar in Ballymaloe to borrow a pretty one from Séamus, but you can use whatever you have, and calculate your own quantities using the method below. I prefer a short, heavy-bottomed glass, with straight sides.

a very lovely selection of glasses from the bar at Ballymaloe

2. Place it on a scales, and set the scales to zero. Then fill it with water, leaving a little gap at the top to account for the egg white foam and water from the ice (around 5mm), and make a note of the volume. Mine was 200ml. Place the glass in the freezer to chill. 

3. Now divide the total volume of the glass by 4.5, to determine one part. Mine is 45ml (yes, I realise that this means that my whiskey sour is a double by some standards, and that is perfectly alright). 

4. Place the shaker on the scales, and add the ingredients, multiplying each one by the volume of your part (in my case, 45ml, i.e. 90ml whiskey, 45ml lemon juice etc.). If you’re multiplying the ingredients by a large number, make sure the ingredients only come about halfway up the side of the shaker. 

5. Add a handful of ice-cubes, put the lid on and shake vigorously for 30 seconds - apparently you’re meant to shake until the shaker is too cold to hold. Strain directly into the chilled glass, allow to settle for 1 minute and garnish with a slice of lemon and a dash of bitters. 

Here’s a little table to show how you can calculate the ingredients required for your own glass (or jug, if you have a big enough shaker or jar!).

Notes:

• You can replace the lemon juice with any citrus juice, but you may need to alter the sugar content (i.e., orange juice will require less sugar). You can also flavour the simple syrup if you like - in March, there was a fun blood orange Cointreau tequila sour on the menu, using leftover blood orange syrup from one of our desserts on the trolley.

• If you have leftover yolks from making your whiskey sour, make some creme pat or ice-cream, or feed them to your dog (apparently it’s good for their coat). 

• If you don’t have a cocktail shaker, a Kilner/Mason jar works as well, just make sure it seals and is big enough so that the liquid only comes halfway up the side. 

• For garnish, I used a slice of dried lemon, but you can use a slice of fresh lemon, sliced very thinly, or a curl of lemon zest removed with a peeler (or any other citrus alternative! I reckon pomelo or grapefruit would be good)

• To make simple syrup, combine equal parts sugar and water (e.g. 100g of sugar and 100ml of water) in a saucepan. Heat until the sugar has dissolved, then allow to cool fully. 

blood orange Cointreau tequila sour at Ballymaloe House, March 2023