Hot buttered rum batter

For years, I thought I didn't like hot buttered rum very much. An oily smear of butter floating on a thin pool of rum-flavoured hot water - nobody's idea of fun. And then last winter, I saw someone in a restaurant at Lake Tahoe (Ciera at the Montbleu hotel - pricey but pleasant) drinking a creamy, hot, cinnamon-smelling glass of something wonderful. I asked the waiter what it was - hot buttered rum. I ordered a glass: rich and buttery, spicy, full of heat and kick from the rum, and silky smooth. How did they get it to emulsify in the glass like that? The waiter said he wasn't allowed to give me a recipe, but did say that the chef made it with a sort of batter he prepared using butter and ice cream, and kept it in the freezer. It's the ice cream which makes the mixture, butter and all, emulsify so pleasingly and creamily in the glass (or mug, if you're at home); and a tub you've made for yourself will keep for months in the freezer, so it's an excellent thing to have on hand for surprise guests. As far as Christmas/winter drinks go, this one's approximately 100% bad for you (do not do what I did last night and have four of them in a row if you don't want to feel a bit unwell), which unfortunately means it's also about 100% delicious.

I made up a few different sets of batter from recipes I found on the Internet. None of them really hit the spot; in common with a lot of American recipes, I found most of them very, very sweet and a bit bland, relying on the vanilla ice cream for much of their flavour. The recipe below is my take on things, rather less sugary than most of the US recipes. I've also used maple syrup along with soft brown sugar for its flavour; and I've spiced quite aggressively, especially when it comes to the nutmeg, which has a wonderful affinity with rum. Allspice, like the rum, is Jamaican in origin, and works incredibly well here. And don't save this mixture just for dolloping in your hot rum and water: as I write this, I'm drinking a lump of the stuff dissolved in a strong mug of coffee, and it's heavenly.

Things like this make winter a bit less grim.

To make just over a litre of batter to keep in the freezer, you'll need:

500ml vanilla ice cream
500g salted butter, softened
200g soft brown sugar
200ml maple syrup
1½ tablespoons allspice
2 tablespoons ground cinnamon
1 whole nutmeg, grated

Let the ice cream sit at room temperature until it's the texture of whipped cream. (You can also make this once the ice cream is completely melted, but I prefer the lighter texture you can achieve using a half-melted tub.) In a large bowl, use an electric whisk to cream together the butter, brown sugar and maple syrup until you have a thick, fluffy mixture. Dump the spices on top with the ice cream and continue to whisk for about five minutes, until the batter is smooth and light. Transfer to containers for freezing.

When you come to make up your drink, just put a dollop of the mixture at the bottom of a mug or glass (I like about three heaped teaspoons in a small mug - your mileage may vary) and add a measure of rum with a small pinch of salt. The salt won't make the drink salty, but it will act to lift the buttery flavour. Pour over water straight from the kettle to fill the mug, stir until the batter is dissolved, sit down in front of the fire and get drinking.

Pimm's Fruit Cup

Summer in the UK is a fragile, short-lived and unreliable thing (yesterday, in flaming June, we had tornadoes and hailstones), so when the sun shines and the air is balmy, especially here in Cambridge, we tend to overcompensate slightly with garden parties, great strings of barbecued sausages, silly hats, flowery frocks and that sine qua non of chi-chi English outdoor gatherings: a few jugs of Pimm's Fruit Cup. A sweet, pinkish liqueur based on gin, Pimm's is available in every off-licence and supermarket in the country; and we mix it with lemonade and what bemused foreigners interpret as a fruit salad, kick back and proceed to get completely sloshed in the sun. There's a certain class thing at work here. Shakespeare in the Park? We drink Pimm's. Wimbledon? Pimm's. May Balls? Pimm's. Opera at Glyndebourne? Pimm's. We also drink it because it's delicious, potent and tends to render pretty 20-year-old students of both genders delightfully cuddly.

This fruity, aromatic, rounded cocktail base was invented by James Pimm, who ran a tavern in the City of London. He came up with the drink, based on gin with fruit, herbs and quinine, some time in the 1820s, soon finding it was so popular that he was able to produce it on a large scale to be sold to other taverns and clubs. It's been a popular summer drink ever since, although the amount of alcohol in the stuff has definitely been reduced by the company that now owns the trademark (Pimm's has in my lifetime reduced its alcohol percentage from 35% ABV to 25%). You can remedy this by adding a splash of gin to your cocktail.

Pimm's is a substance sadly missed by those who come to the university here for a year or so from overseas. When visiting friends we made at university who have since moved back to America or other Pimm's-free lands, we usually try to bring a bottle for them so we can all spend an evening reliving our glided youth. But I bear glad tidings for the overseas summer alcoholic. You can actually make the base mix for your Pimm's (which we shall now call 'fruit cup' - and indeed, Pimm's is not the only available brand; try Plymouth Fruit Cup for a rather more aromatic option, or Stone's Fruit Cup for a distinct ginger kick) out of a mixture of liqueurs you may well have in the drinks cupboard already - use 2 parts 40% gin, 2 parts red vermouth, 1 part Cointreau (or your favourite orange liqueur), 1 part sweet port and a dash of Angostura bitters. It'll be a bit stronger than the pre-bottled stuff, but it tastes very fine indeed. If you do decide to make your own fruit cup from scratch, Hendrick's gin, with its cucumbery overtones, really comes into its own here - and if you use Dubonnet for your red vermouth, you can award yourself the Queen Mother seal of approval; Dubonnet was her all-time favourite liquid.

You should build your drink in a large jug by gently muddling a small handful of mint in 1 part Pimm's or home-made fruit cup, then adding 1 part lemonade and 1 part ginger ale, with a good handful of soft English summer fruits, some sliced cucumber and fresh mint bobbing about in the jug with some ice. I like raspberries frozen into ice cubes, so they float rather than sink to the bottom initially - this means that you can arrange for some raspberries to end up in everybody's glass, and the freezing makes the cell walls burst, so once the cubes have melted, the liquid at the bottom of your glass will be syrupy with raspberry juice. Borage flowers (a blue flower with a taste reminiscent of cucumber) are a traditional addition, and look lovely in the drink if you can find them. One jugful will be enough for a lovely boozy evening for two.

Veritable Quandary, Portland, OR

I have been skiing vigorously all day, and I'm as tired as a dog - so what you're getting here is going to be a spot shorter than usual. Veritable Quandary (VQ to locals) is a bar and restaurant serving killer-fantastic cocktails, and food which is thoroughly decent if not extraordinary. It's right next to the Hawthorne Bridge in Portland, with an excellent view of the Willamette river. Look out for the portrait on the inner wall of the conservatory featuring someone looking like a female, Victorian Charles Atlas.

The drinks are simply fantastic. At the top of the page is a VQ-8 - the house Bloody Mary, made with a home-infused beet vodka, making it a gorgeous, lurid magenta and giving the whole drink wonderfully earthy depth. Try the aromatic martini made with limoncello and a lavender-infused vodka (again, made in the bar) - wonderful stuff.

Another time, I think I might be tempted to visit VQ for their drinks and bar snacks alone. I had one of those bar snacks as a starter - these dates (left), wrapped in pancetta and stuffed with goat's cheese and Marcona almonds. Lovely sticky, sweet, salty, crispy, squashy things to nibble alongside a drink. Dr W's snackish starter was a very tasty rabbit terrine (below), served with huge hunks of fresh, toasted brioche, a couple of mustards and some chutney.

Main courses thrilled me less. Barbecued boneless beef short rib was always going to be unsophisticated, but the saucing was altogether too much, and the meat itself felt sad and overdone (although this could have been a result of a too-fierce sauce masking the joint's own flavour). The barley risotto it was perched on top of, though, was great, full of chunks of apple and roast butternut squash. Dr W's steak was...a steak. A perfectly nice steak, although we both felt we could have happily swapped it and the short rib for a few more of those far more interesting starters.

Full of meat and cocktails, we had two $1 truffles for dessert. They were sticky, dense and coated the inside of your mouth beautifully. I've since heard from friends that other desserts are also great - the home-made ice-creams and sorbets (look for flavours like roasted hazelnut, spiced cider and red wine-pomegranate) and the souffles got a particular mention. Head to VQ for views, cocktails, dessert and nibbles - and, like many other Portland restaurants, uncommonly attractive waiting staff. What's going on there?

Sangria

I know plenty of books and Internet commentators will tell you strictly that you should only ever cook or mix cocktails with wines you would be happy to drink on their own. I thumb my (adorable button) nose at them. I've made this sangria twice in the last week with two different £3 bottles of Rioja, and I can assure you that using a more expensive bottle will simply be a waste of money - I cringe to imagine you stirring orange juice and sugar into a really good wine. On the other hand, it is worth buying a good lemonade for this drink (lemon soda like Sprite for Americans, not the fresh stuff). I like Schweppes.

You should make and drink your sangria in the same evening. If it hangs around for more than a few hours, the wine can oxidise and sour. The evening you make it, though, your sangria will be delicious: it's a drink full of sunshine and goes very well with some salsa music and tapas.

To make 2 l of sangria, you'll need:

1 bottle Rioja
3 large, juicy oranges
2 tablespoons caster sugar
1 lime
1 apple
1 small wineglass brandy
Lemonade
Ice

You'll need a 2 l jug, preferably with a wide neck, to mix this in.

Dissolve the sugar in the juice of two of the oranges in the bottom of the jug. Slice the remaining orange, skin and all, into thick pieces with the lime and the cored apple, and drop them into the jug. Pour over the bottle of wine and the brandy, then add a large handful of ice and carefully fill the jug to the top with lemonade. Stir and serve immediately.

Disco gin and tonic - yours to make at home with some electronic engineering

Regular readers will be aware of my tragic addiction to all things Las Vegas. It's been nearly six months since our last visit, and I am pining for bright lights and cocktails. Few things make a drink nicer than some coloured lights in the vicinity.

Dr Weasel, ever alert to the causes of his wife's grumpiness, decided to cheer me up by making me an animated, brightly lit drinks coaster.

Here it is under a gin and tonic:



And here it is, glass-free, displaying a spinning galactic ice-cube.



The coaster can be driven from any PC with a serial port and will display any 10×10-pixel video you wish. Over to Dr Weasel for his version of a recipe (100% less lead-free than the recipes you'll usually find here).

You will need:

30 1K 0805 resistors (R1 - R30)
30 MBTA42 NPN transistors (Q1 - Q30)
10 100 Ohm 0805 resistors (R31 - R40)
10 FMMT717 PNP transistors (Q31 - Q40)
5 74HC594 SOIC shift registers (IC1 - IC5)
4 100nF 1206 capacitors (C1 - C4)

and finally:

100 TB5-V120-FLUX-RGB8000 RGB LEDs (LED00 - LED99)

The LEDs can be hard to get hold of at a decent price; eBay is once again the friend of the penurious electrical engineer.

Manufacture one or more PCBs using these Gerber and drill files. A double-sided PTH process is required, so it is probably best to use one of the various small-volume professional PCB manufacturers; I have found PCB Train in the UK to be fairly reliable. Assemble the board, taking great care when soldering the surface mount components. I found this one to be right at the limit of my dexterity.

Attach power and data cables to the connector in the bottom right of the board. Seen from above, we number the six pins:

1 2 3
4 5 6

The corresponding signals are:

1. XVOLTS - drive voltage for LEDs. Connect to 4V current limited supply.
2. SERIAL_CLOCK - shift data from SERIAL_DATA on positive-going edge.
3. SERIAL_LATCH - latch 40 bits from shift register to LED control on positive-going edge.
4. GROUND - common ground.
5. 5VOLTS - supply voltage for control circuitry. Connect to 5V supply.
6. SERIAL_DATA - input data for shift register.

To scan the display, clock 10 4-bit numbers into the shift register. To clock in a bit:

• bring SERIAL_CLOCK low
• modify SERIAL_DATA
• bring SERIAL_CLOCK high

Once 40 bits have been clocked in, the SERIAL_LATCH signal can be brought high to transfer them to the LED control circuitry. Each 4 bit number selectively enables the red, green and blue LEDs in one row, and selectively disables all LEDs in one column. So if we clock in a string:

0011 0100 0111 ...
RGCB RGCB RGCB

This sets all the LEDs in row 0 to blue, all the LEDs in row 1 to green and all the LEDS in row 2 to cyan (green + red). It disables all the LEDs in columns 0 and 2. By rapidly clocking in various combinations of values (typically with only 1 of the 10 column-disable bits low), we can scan the array to build up an image, and use pulse-width modulation to give a range of apparent intensities.

This firmware can be used with an Atmel ATmega644 to generate the required signals in response to serial input from a PC or Mac.

A couple of words of warning. Modern LEDs can be very bright indeed. You could probably hurt yourself pretty badly by dialling them up to full intensity and ignoring your look-away reflex, so don't. Also, when debugging your firmware it is easy to stall the scanning process and burn out the precious LEDs. Use a decent current-limited bench power supply, with the current dialled back to a few tens of milliamps to avoid this happening.