Recipe - Honey Lemon Drop a la Gustav

I love entertaining.

When I have a cocktail, I tend to drink the favored drinks of a 65-year-old English professor who smokes a pipe in the library every evening: gin martinis, Irish whiskey, stout. However, when I get the girls together for a ladies' night, I want to show off my mixology skills and create a pretty presentation.

I'm constantly creating and revising recipes for our cocktail evenings. When I was in Portland recently, I ate at Gustav's, a German pub and grill. They had a Honey Lemon Drop on their summer cocktail menu. I had one of those "I can do that" moments.

Cocktails mixers, however, contain lots of "fake foods" - high fructose corn syrup, artificial dyes and colorings, and unpronounceable ingredients. The same goes for those rimming sugars you can buy. The challenge, then, became to re-create this drink and make it greener.

Honey Lemon Drop a la Gustav

You're going to need:

Lemons

Honey

Hot water

Vodka

Sugar in the Raw or other sugar with large crystals

Cut the lemons in half. Carefully, with a sharp knife, peel off a strip of rind. You'll need one of these for each glass.

Squeeze the lemons and save the juice. You'll need about 1 oz. per drink.

In a separate container, mix 4 parts honey (make sure that you have honey rather than artificial honey, which is much more common at the grocery store) to 1 part hot water. You'll need about a 1/2 oz. of this honey syrup for each drink.

Get your glasses ready. In one plate, pour a mixture of water and lemon juice. In the other, pour your sugar.

Dip the rim of each glass in the water, then twirl the rim the glass in the sugar. Drop a twist of lemon rind in each glass.

In a shaker filled with ice, shake:

2 oz. vodka

3/4 - 1 oz. lemon juice

1/2 - 3/4 oz honey syrup.

Pour into your beautiful glass and serve.