A grasshopper-adjacent cocktail.
Recipe
- 1 part blue curaçao
- 1 part white chocolate liqueur
- 1 part simple syrup
- 3 parts milk or milk substitute or 1 part heavy cream
- 2 dashes orange bitters
Combine all ingredients. Optionally shake and/or serve with ice.
Purpose
The skyhopper is based on the grasshopper, which is traditionally 1:1:1 heavy cream : crème de menthe : crème de cacao. We don't usually have heavy cream around so we tend to substitute milk or a milk alternative and fill the glass, yielding something like 6:1:1 milk : crème de menthe : crème de cacao.
Summer likes everything about the grasshopper except the mint flavor. I like making grasshoppers because their ingredients are shelf stable and/or always on hand (after the milk substitution). I started on a journey to replace the mint with orange.
Mint to Orange
Mint is a foundational flavor in the grasshopper, so simply replacing it with a comparatively light flavor like blue curaçao causes the crème de cacao to fill the flavor vacuum, turning it into a chocolatey drink.
Replacing the crème de cacao with white chocolate liqueur limits the chocolate flavor's impact. The orange bitters then strengthen the orange more. The simple syrup removes some flatness from the flavor when not using heavy cream (and can probably be dropped otherwise).