Frambellini

The traditional Bellini cocktail, invented in Venice in 1934, involves fizzy wine and peach puree, chilled and stirred. But raspberries are at least as good as peaches, so take some sparkling wine and add some blended raspberries instead. I call it the Frambellini. The conventional Bellini recipe suggested one part puree to two parts wine. The one pictured above used just a dash or two of fruit, topped up with bubbles. It depends what you're after: a boozy fruit drink or a glass of bubbly with a hint of fruit. The choice is yours.

Kir Petillant

Yet another way to make ordinary fizzy wine taste less ordinary. Creme de Mure (15% vol) is made with blackberries, and a dash added to a glass of non-descript prosecco made for a decent pre-dinner drink. According to strict teachings, this cocktail was a Kir Petillant, rather than a Kir Royale, since it used sparkling wine rather than champagne. Disconcertingly for pedants, however, both Kirs are traditionally made with Creme de Cassis (blackcurrant), rather than de Mure, placing a question mark over the correct name for our alternative. Still, if there are times to avoid getting bogged down by definitions, this is one of them: drink while the bubbles are lively.

Chinese New Year Cocktails

Having volunteered to make drinks to accompany our Chinese New Year celebrations I shamelessly fell back on the usual Asian clichés ingredients: lychee, ginger, green tea. And why not?

My task was made a great deal easier by the discovery of the fabulous Green Tea Gimlet on the Drink of the Week blog, a startlingly refreshing citrus cocktail that I hurriedly adapted and adopted. What follows is essentially the same drink except I infused my vodka with ginger to give it a further kick.

Ginger Green Tea Gimlet (pictured above)

45ml (1.5oz) ginger-infused vodka*
30ml (1oz) green tea syrup**
23ml (0.75oz) fresh lemon juice

Pour ingredients into a cocktail shaker filled with ice and shake vigorously for 20 seconds (you want as many tiny grains of ice in the drink as possible). Strain into cocktail glass and garnish with lemon wheel.

*To make ginger-infused vodka finely grate a teaspoon of fresh ginger into about 250ml of vodka. Shake bottle well and leave for 24 hours. Strain to remove bits before serving.

**To make the green tea syrup:

250ml (1 cup) water

250ml (1 cup) sugar

1 green tea bag

Combine sugar and water in a saucepan and bring to the boil. Pour into container and steep tea bag in the liquid for 6-7 minutes. Let cool. Refrigerate until ready to use.

Next up, I wanted to try a Chinese variation on the Kir Royale, and decided to replace the crème de cassis with lychee. Having exhausted myself making the previous drink I refused to worry about fresh lychees and used a tin for both the fruit and the syrup. The result, I'm told, was "amazing - lychee juice with bubbles".

Lychee Fizz (pictured below right)

45ml (1.5oz) lychee syrup
Sparkling wine

Lychee to garnish

Drop a lychee into a champagne flute before adding the lychee syrup and topping with chilled sparkling wine.

If I made it again I'd shove the tinned lychees and the syrup into a blender first and chill the resulting matter before serving to make the drink even more lychee-ee.

I may have tried to create a couple of other cocktails too - a lychee ginger martini, for one, along with a tiny shot of warm rum layered with a peculiar ginger foam, which I named the Tiger Tot. Let's just say they didn't quite make the cut. Until next year, then.

Kir Royale

Boulevard Brasserie

36 Wellington Street
London

WC2E 7BD

This Kir Royale formed part of a French restaurant's set menu. The recipe is simply a splash of crème de cassis (blackcurrant liqueur) topped with champagne. I hope I'm not being too cynical in suspecting the champagne was probably a generic sparkling wine, to the disbenefit of nothing more than good manners and Trading Standards: as we all know, such a drink should properly be advertised as a Kir Pétillant. No matter, this was a good way of using fizz - with the dry bubbly and sweet blackcurrent playing well together.

Variations can switch out the crème de cassis in favour of de mûre (blackberry) or de pèche (peach), the latter sometimes known as a Kir Peche. A truncated Kir replaces the champagne with dry white wine.