Blackberry Coulis Cocktail

Sometimes I go looking for recipes to blog, and sometimes they find me. That’s what happened with this cocktail. I was on Pinterest one night, and I came across this Blackberry Coulis Cocktail recipe. I was getting ready to reshoot one of the first cocktails I ever blogged, the Blackberry Mojito, and I thought I would kill two birds with one stone, so to speak. So I doubled up on my blackberry order, and I ended up making two cocktails instead of one. I love this job!

Blackberry Coulis Cocktail is a deliciously refreshing blend of blackberries, Chambord liqueur, and dark rum and a little fizz – slightly sweet, a little tart, and a whole lot of sexy.

The Ingredients

So the blackberries were taken care of, but I had a few other ingredients to gather before I could make my Blackberry Coulis Cocktail. Water is a given, and I had the vanilla extract and demerara sugar in my pantry. It was leftover from the Baileys Pumpkin Spice Espresso Martini recipe I made a long time ago, but it was still perfectly good.

I also had some Chambord on hand from reshooting the photos for my Adult Raspberry Italian Cream Soda post. And I even had leftover Flor de Caña dark rum from the Old Cuban cocktail I made a while back.

That left me needing limes since I always have soda water in my refrigerator. How easy was that?!

The Process

Making this cocktail was a little more involved than your typical cocktail recipe since I had to use the stove and a blender. Here’s how my time was spent:

• 10 minutes to make the blackberry coulis
• 30 minutes to cool
• 3 minutes to blend
• 5 minutes to make the cocktails
• 48 minutes total

The recipe lists times of 10 minutes for prep, 5 minutes to cook, and 15 minutes total. I’m guessing the discrepancy is due to including time to cool the blackberry coulis. If I omit that, my total time was 18 minutes. Much closer to the recipe’s time.

Making the Blackberry Coulis

Making the blackberry coulis seemed similar to making fruit-infused simple syrup, something I have done many times. The only difficulty I had with this part of the recipe was due to my kitchen scale. It’s actually a postal scale I repurposed, and it doesn’t go down to single grams. It starts at 5 and goes to 10, with no increments in between. I really need a new one!

Because of my scale, I had to look up how to convert grams of vanilla extract to teaspoons. Can you believe there was a converter just for converting grams of vanilla extract? I was thrilled! By the way, 3 grams of vanilla extract is .71 teaspoons or just under 3/4 of a teaspoon.

I simmered blackberries, water, and sugar in a small saucepan, then removed it from the heat and allowed it to cool for 30 minutes. Once it was cooled, I poured it into my blender and pureed it.

Finally, I strained it into a small container and refrigerated it overnight. The pureed coulis was very thick, and I found it helpful to use the back of a wooden spoon to press it through the strainer. Otherwise, it would have taken ages to drip through the mesh!

Making the Blackberry Coulis Cocktails

The blackberry coulis was the “hard” part, and the actual cocktails were pretty easy. If you’ve ever made a shaken and strained cocktail, you’ll have no problem with this one.

I filled the cocktail glasses about 3/4 of the way with ice and the cocktail then topped them off with soda water. The recipe gives the option of using ginger ale, but I didn’t have any on hand.

The entire process took me 5 minutes, and that included spearing blackberries onto cocktail picks for the garnish. Not too shabby for such beautiful cocktails!