Sip your way to Christmas with this light and fresh festive poinsettia cocktail punch. Wonderful for toasting in the New Year too!

Wishing you all a magical Christmas season filled with love, and family, and many joyous new memories!

For Christmas Eve I'm preparing our family's traditional meal, in the German style: Fleisch Rouladen (this year made with my hunter sister, Ingrid's, flavourful, wild venison meat), spätzle (I'm working on perfecting a gluten-free version), sweet and sour red cabbage, and cucumber salad. And on Christmas day we're having our family's traditional roast goose with sauerkraut and prune stuffing, and all the trimmings. What are you having?

And to sip?

Last week we had our annual Christmas gathering with friends - an evening of food and fun and crazy games that we always look forward to. I served a favourite Christmas drink of ours - Nigella Lawson's Poinsettia cocktails. It provided the cheer for many a Christmas toast throughout the evening and I thought I'd share it with you all. It's light, and fresh and just shouts 'Christmas festivities!' Everybody always loves this drink! I imagine it would be wonderful for toasting-in the New Year, too.

Cheers and best of love throughout the holiday season!

Kitchen Frau Notes: The recipe calls for a sparkling dry white wine, which would be champagne. Only sparkling wine produced under certain regulations, in the Champagne region of France, can actually be called champagne, but other countries produce wonderful sparkling dry white wines of their own - just called by different names. In Italy it's called Prosecco, in Spain it's called Cava and the Germans call it Sekt. My favourie sparkling dry white wine is actually quite inexpensive - the German Sekt named "Henkell Trocken". It's what I always use in this cocktail (and for any of my 'champagne' moments!)

The cranberry juice needs to be the sweetened kind, like Ocean Spray® cranberry cocktail. I think the natural, unsweetened kind you buy at health food stores would be too tart in this drink.

Poinsettia Cocktail Punch

from Nigella Lawson's book 'Nigella Christmas' 

• • 125 ml (½ cup) orange liqueur, like Cointreau, Grand Marnier, or Triple Sec
  • 500 ml (2 cups) cranberry juice
  • one bottle (750ml) sparkling dry white wine, such as Sekt, Prosecco, or Champagne
    

In a large pitcher mix the orange liqueur and cranberry juice. Top with the sparkling wine, stir gently and serve. I like to plop an ice cube or two in each glass, too.

You could get fancy and decorate each drink with an orange curl, or slice, or with a fresh cranberry or two, but I never seem to get that organized.

Makes 8 cocktails.

*If you want to make individual cocktails, or a larger or lesser amount, the ratios are:                        1 part orange liqueur : 4 parts cranberry juice : 6 parts sparkling dry white wine

 

Prosit! and Merry Christmas!

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Rouladen, a Christmas Eve Tradition

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Decadent Little Truffles