whisky

DIY Irish Cream

My Fellow Inebriates,

This bear plays with fire.

As my friend Blackie often reminds me, it’s bad for us bears to get involved in cooking because we’re so easily mistaken for the oven mitt. Now, this might just be liquored-up paranoia, but it’s been enough to keep me away from the stove since we moved to our house. I don’t have anything to do with that thing. In fact, when it’s on I cower in the liquor cabinet.

But an urge is coming over me to make my own Irish cream liqueur, or at least order my mum to make some. She’s a real lush when it comes to high-cal liqueurs, so it shouldn’t be a hard sell. But what recipe do we use, people? There are HUNDREDS of them on the net, and I have no idea what to go with. Some of them use full cream, some half; some use raw eggs; some use coffee, some don’t…I have no idea how to pick the right recipe.

My second problem is lack of appropriate booze. We don’t have any whisky in the house, Irish or otherwise, so my question to you is: Is it okay to substitute Malibu? Will I still end up with something reasonably like an Irish cream? Or what if I use Bacardi Big Apple?

Ultimately it doesn’t matter because I’ll drink whatever results and then engage in all kinds of nighttime wildness. But I figure if I’m going to give some of my homemade hooch away to pals for the holidays, I should try and get it right.

What do you think? Do you have a favorite Irish cream recipe?

JAMESON IRISH WHISKEY

The last time we had this in the house it was earmarked for—get this—an Irish cream cheesecake, i.e., another profligate waste of decent booze. For all my mother’s claims to Irish heritage, she doesn’t have the first clue what Irish liquor is actually for, so instead of drinking it she chucks it into cakes that spend an hour burning off their alcohol content in the oven.

This is very frustrating.

Nevertheless I did get a chance to taste the dregs of the aforementioned airline-sized bottle before it was sacrificed to gluttony rather than drunkenness.

For $33, JAMESON IRISH WHISKEY, in sufficient quantities, would totally get the job done. It’s a little rough and unfocused—fruity, nutty, a touch metallic even—but there’s nothing disturbing or offensive about it. With a moderate burn and a short finish, it suggests itself for Irish coffee and hints at the flavors in Bailey’s, so at least my mum picked the right booze for her greedy project.

I’d be perfectly content to sip JAMESON straight up, and I advise the same for my mother, the expansion of whose ass is a threat to smallish animals like myself who tend to get left under couch cushions, etc. Then she could say: “I’ve gone on a whiskey diet. I’ve lost three days already!” instead of needing to visit Walmart for fat pants and ending up on the internet in one of those people-of-Walmart photos.

I highly RECOMMEND not monkeying around with this awesome triple-distilled blended whiskey, and drinking it.