How To Fall In Love With Lemon Bars and End Up With New Cocktails (Part 3)

Part 3: In Which We Use The Lemon Bar Clarified Milk Punch To Mix Up Other Dessert Cocktails

My perfect lemon bar has some passionfruit in it (as I wrote about in Part 1), and now that I had the Lemon Bar Clarified Milk Punch on hand (that we made in Part 2), I was ready to make the perfect cocktail homage to my favorite dessert. Experimenting with this simple recipe reminded me of the big difference between using bitters and liqueurs/syrups. I had thought that the making the lemon bar milk punch into a passionfruit-lemon bar cocktail would be as simple as adding a bit of passionfruit liqueur, but these two ingredients really didn’t play well together, yielding a cough syrup-like, cloying quality. I love the Giffard Passion Fruit liqueur, so I was dismayed that this combination didn’t work, but this turned into the perfect example of where bitters do the job better.

The Passion of the Lemon Bar
2 oz Lemon Bar Clarified Milk Punch
⅛-¼ oz Amaro Nonino
½ teaspoon Boy Drinks World Passion Fruit Bitters

Stir over ice. Strain over a large ice cube. Garnish with a Lemon Bar on the side (why not?).

Somehow imitating just one dessert through interpretive cocktailing wasn’t enough, so I set out to make an homage to my other favorite dessert: The Northern Lights from Pläj in Hayes Valley in San Francisco. This dessert is their take on a Baked Alaska, and is a decadent combination of a chocolate and passionfruit center covered with a toasted meringue. I stumbled on this recipe accidentally while experimenting with other flavors to combine with the clarified milk punch and it immediately reminded me of The Northern Lights.

The Lemon Aurora
2 oz Lemon Bar Clarified Milk Punch
⅓ oz Green Chartreuse
1 teaspoon Crude Big Bear Coffee and Cocoa Bitters
4 dashes Boy Drinks World Passion Fruit Bitters
½ egg white OR Ms. Better's Bitters Miraculous Foamer

Reverse dry shake. Strain into a coupe glass. Garnish with a mint leaf.