A brilliant failure!

A couple of weeks ago I was not only scrambling to get Rage Against the Dark ready for assembly, I was scrambling to come up with the cocktail menu for the bar at 3 Old Men.

To bypass the suspense, here’s the menu I eventually came up with: In Cold Blood (bourbon, bitter); Rose-Colored G; Thyme & the Citadel; Meletti Manhattan (rich, chocolate tones); and an [unnamed bourbon drink], which I’ll blog about soon enough over at dalelyles.com.

But having watched an episode of the Great British Baking Show in which the bakers were challenged to decorate a cake with isomalt sugar, I was seized with an inspiration: I could make some fancy sugar thingie and use it to make/decorate a simple Old-Fashioned.

First, go scan this article on using isomalt. Mad respect to anyone who can do all that to produce the images at that link in the preceding paragraph, but I discovered quickly that I am not that person.

Tempering the stuff wasn’t a problem. Pouring it out to harden was not a problem.

Cutting/scoring/shaping it was definitely a problem. It was sticky, which I was not expecting, and it didn’t want to yield to any knife or pizza cutter.

And finally, it didn’t melt into the bourbon, which was the whole point of making the things.

(I actually weighed one of the pieces to make sure it did not go over the amount that would give the customer diarrhea. I’m thoughtful like that.)

But wasn’t it pretty?