I have had a bottle of my favorite sparkling wine chilling in my refrigerator for ages, and I finally found the perfect way to use it with these Christmas Morning Mimosas. Not only will they allow me to finally indulge in that bottle, but they also fit the holiday and dinner theme. And the most important theme of the whole menu: simplicity. Score!
You can find my 2022 Christmas Dinner Menu as a free downloadable Google Doc. It includes a schedule, a shopping list, and an equipment list. The checkboxes on the lists are interactive and cross off each item when you click them. You may also print it or save it and make any changes you like.
Determined to get you in the holiday spirit, I’m serving you a cocktail so full of festive sparkle that you can’t resist.
The Ingredients
Not only did I have the champagne on hand, but I also had the cranberries thanks to Cranberry Glazed Turkey Breast. I also had sugar leftover from the Spiced Mascarpone Cranberry Cake, so that left me with a very short shopping list. I do love those!
All I needed to buy to make my mimosas was a package of rosemary sprigs and some cranberry juice. I did look for the others just to see if I could find the alternatives. Pomegranate juice was in stock but not blood orange juice.
The Process
I was skeptical of the 15-minute total time when I read over this recipe, but I came close at 17 minutes.
Making the Sugared Cranberries
The first step was to make simple syrup by boiling sugar and water in a saucepan. It only took me a few minutes, but the sugar never quite dissolved. I ended up with a thick granulated syrup but that was perfectly fine for sugared cranberries.
The syrup needed to be cool to the touch before I could use it for the sugared cranberries. That’s what made me skeptical of the time, but I worked around it. First, I poured the syrup into a plastic container and placed it onto a gel ice pack. Then I put a smaller gel ice pack into the container and stirred until it was cool to the touch.
I tried picking out a few with my fingers and rolling them in sugar, but things got clumpy. I decided to put the cranberries into the syrup and then drain them on a wire cooling rack with a container underneath to catch the drips.
That allowed the excess sugar to drain off and kept away most of the clumps. I used a second rack for the sugared cranberries with a cutting board underneath to catch the stray sugar. It worked a treat!
Making the Christmas Morning Mimosas
All that was left was to make the Christmas Morning Mimosas. I followed the instructions by adding cranberry juice to the champagne flutes. Then I poured in most of the champagne, added the rosemary, topped off the champagne, then tossed in 3 sugared cranberries. There was a short pause after each step once the champagne went in because it foamed after each pour/garnish.
By the way, I tried them with 1 ounce of cranberry juice and didn’t think they were red enough. Doubling that was better but still not quite as red as the photos.
