Jam cocktails: Shake up festive holiday drinks by adding some specialty preserves to the mix.

When Quince & Apple sent me an assortment of their specialty preserves, I knew I wanted to make something out of the ordinary. I mean, thumbprint cookies and cheese pairings are great, but I really wanted to find a more surprising way to use them. Enter, jam cocktails. The thought popped into my head one day, and I immediately did some Pinterest searching and internet browsing to validate my idea. This is how almost all of my recipes come to life. Ideas followed by research, testing and eating – or drinking in this case.

More awesome cocktails: Wisconsin brandy old fashioned / pamplemousse fizz / ginger saketinis

After that, it was just a matter of taste testing, and experimenting with flavors. It was a lot of fun to see how the preserves paired with different types of alcohol. I had originally intended to only do two cocktail recipes – one for myself and one for Marc – but curiosity got the best of me and we ended up with the most intriguing of the three recipes – the apple cranberry amaretto margarita.

These specialty jam cocktails would be great to serve during the holidays. They’re festive, and if you want, you can customize each drink for your guests. You could even substitute preserves in place simple syrup in most recipes. It’s a great replacement because it adds depth of flavor and sweetness at the same time.

jam cocktails – a simple formula

If you want to play around with flavors, here’s my basic formula for a jam cocktail. Keep in mind that each variation will need to be tweaked to balance the flavors, but if you follow this formula, you’ll have a pretty good start to your own unique cocktail.

• 2 shots liquor
• 1 shot liqueur
• 1 shot lemon or lime juice
• 1 – 2 tablespoons preserves

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