Kiwi Christmas - sausage rolls and cocktails

This year’s Kiwi Christmas – a gathering of the Other Half and his New Zealand friends along with their partners and children, prior to Christmas Day itself – came with a challenge.

And the challenge was a cocktails and sausage rolls competition.

Now, I know how to make a sausage roll. But when it comes to cocktails I’m pretty much out of touch, thanks to a four year alcohol drought caused by pregnancy and breastfeeding (times two).

Luckily for me, the lovely people at Sainsbury’s invited me along to a sparkling wine tasting evening which gave me not only the opportunity to try a selection of this year’s range, but also inspired my cocktail making plans.

The Sainsbury’s Blanc De Noirs was my personal favourite from the evening – it has a lovely earthy taste along with somehow firmer bubbles that give a very pleasing drinking sensation. Perhaps not so good in a cocktail though, so I decided to save that option for Christmas Day itself!

The Taste the Difference Fairtrade Moscato Rosé, on the other hand – with its lighter, sweet and fruity taste – seemed perfectly suited to a cocktail, especially since I already had the perfect partner on hand for it in the form of a neglected bottle of gin.

Grabbing some mint, grenadine, lemonade, and the aforementioned moscato and gin, along with our tray of uncooked shortcrust sausage rolls, we headed off to the get-together…

…where we were greeted by a sausage creation of Father Christmas and his sleigh! Well, our sausage offering paled into significance in terms of presentation when faced with that…and then, the Other Half decided that cooking our sausage rolls on the barbecue would be a good idea.

Clearly, we did not win the sausage roll part of the competition equation!

Which meant that our potential for success now rested solely on the construction of the cocktail.

I hadn’t had any time to try it out previously, so taking an educated guess (courtesy mainly of Sainsbury’s) I chucked the following into a jug:

10 pieces of fresh mint, crushed
Six parts Moscato Rosé
One parts gin
One part grenadine
Two parts lemonade

As it turns out, it was very, very nice!

In fact, everyone else agreed – so it wasn’t long before the bottle was drained and the cocktail crowned joint winner.

Shame about the sausages, but hurray for our Moscato cocktail! The fun and merriment continued, festive food was eaten, crackers pulled with lights blinking and candles flickering, and everyone had a whale of a time.