CthulhuTech Punch

In case you have someone avoided noticing this, I spend a lot of time looking at pictures of food online. Sometimes I branch out and look at pictures of drinks online.



(In case the mountain of dice in the background of this picture didn't alert you, my friends and I are sort of nerdy.)

We've been playing a game called CthulhuTech for a while now. Not quite a year, but more than nine months. It's nice to know that we'll all get to see each other twice a month, and since someone is always driving at least an hour, we normally make everyone dinner, too. Darth Bird made us 100% homemade lasagna the first time, which may or may not have ruined me for the lasagna of mere mortals. And... a bird I have not yet named made delicious German Beef Rouladen and spätzle. I have made boring safe things, like Sriracha Joes and meatball sandwiches. But so far, everything has been completely amazing.

But apparently just cooking for friends wasn't enough for me, because I branched out into looking at drinks. And I came across Kaiser Penguin's website, and a drink he called Cthulhu Punch. And I automatically knew that there was no way our group could get away with not drinking that immediately. It became affectionately known as 'our rum dream.'

CthulhuTech Punch adapted from Kaiser Penguin

1 ounce Appleton V/X

1 ounce El Dorado 15-year

1 ounce Kraken rum

1 ounce Aalborg Akvavit

1 ounce blood orange juice

1/2 ounce lime juice

1 ounce creme de almond

2 dashes Angostura bitters

1. Shake with ice, and pour.
   

So boozey. The original called for Kummel, but we could not find that. It also used orgeat syrup, and I could not find any and just substituted something with an almond flavor because I didn't want to try to make it, despite the instructions on the site. The nice thing about making this with a group of friends was that everyone bought just one bottle of rum (except Darth Bird, who was thoroughly committed to the dream), so it wasn't terribly expensive. I was a bit afraid of first, thinking that was that so rum in it the drink would be amazingly overpowering. But with all those different boozes mixed in the bite of the alcohol was nearly gone, leaving just the flavor. The blood orange and lime gave it a great citrus kick too. We are definitely going to make more of these next time we're nerding out.

Today's lessons learned:

• Some states have strange liquor laws.