Apricots and Brandy

You didn’t think we were done with apricots, did you? I still have a box and a half on my kitchen floor, so I’m still experimenting.

I already mentioned Apricot Brandy experiment number one: a pretty generic three-ingredient Apricot Brandy Recipe from Food.com. It called for mixing apricots, sugar and vodka and letting them sit in a dark space for about eight days. I’m four days in, and a little concerned that the sugar isn’t mixing well even with daily bottle-tipping.

After four days, there's still a layer of sugar at the bottom.

For my second experiment, I stayed with vodka but searched for something with more of a twist. I found it in Alton Brown’s Orca Apricot Brandy. This recipe was a similar concoction to the first, but this time with a kind of simple syrup using apricot jam as a base. It went on the shelf Wednesday afternoon. I’ll know if it worked in about a week.

Finally, I felt like I really wanted to make apricot brandy with actual…brandy. For some reason, maybe because I felt like I was stepping up my game using real brandy, I also wanted to use honey as a sweetener. After some searching, I found this recipe for Sandsedge Brandy from the Fantasy Inn blog.

It’s from a fascinating little blog I’d never heard of before, a recipe designed to pair with a scene from a book I’d never heard of, but I was instantly enchanted.

The blog reviews fantasy titles. Blogger Wol developed this recipe to pair with Fool’s Errand by Robin Hobb. I’m not endorsing the book; I’ve never read it. It might be great; it might be terrible. However, the whole idea of creating a drink for a book charmed me, so I decided to give it a try.

It was a pretty-straightforward recipe. I had just enough of my own home-grown honey to use in the simple syrup, and the jar looks amazing sitting on the cupboard shelf next to the other two. (I kind of want to dive in now, it’s so pretty.)

Apricots, brandy, honey, sugar and time--hopefully a recipe for success.

The downside is that I will need to wait four to eight weeks to find out if it worked. That’s an upside, too, though. Some things just get better with time.