Mulled Wine

Okay okay, so this post is really just an excuse to try out my new camera. I don’t have a ‘set’ recipe for mulled wine, I always just adjust it to my taste at the time, tasting and adding bits as I go along. For the past few years I lived in a student house with four other people so we would buy a box of wine but this year I made it with just one bottle, so here’s a rough guide for one bottle’s worth. 

Ingredients:

1 bottle red wine

2 sliced oranges or a glass of orange juice

some lemon peel - approx half a lemon

1 tsp cloves

2-3 star anise

1 -2 cinnamon sticks

1 grated nutmeg

100g Demerara sugar

Method:

1. Gently heat up the wine in a saucepan. GENTLY. Put it on the lowest setting, you don’t want all the alcohol burning off!
2. Add all the other ingredients. Keep heating but don’t let it boil, you should start to see steam rising but you want it at a drinkable temperature so test throughout ;) Add more ingredients to taste.
3. Serve in awesome Christmas Market mugs! (Got this one from the Edinburgh Christmas Market, definitely worth losing the deposit!)

Notes/tips:

• As you can see in the photo, we also tried adding cardamom pods this year but I didn’t think they really added anything to it. Go for it though if you want to try something different!
• Also – do NOT use a blood orange like we did. Ugh, so bitter. We had to compensate by adding tons of sugar.
• A note on the sugar...I actually never measure how much I put in. I worked out the quantity above by doing a bit of internet browsing and finding an average amount, then increasing it. I like it pretty sweet so would just keep adding it till it tasted right!
• If you want something a bit stronger, add a few shots of dark rum to make ‘fire punch’. Might be doing this for Hogmanay to prepare myself for the Edinburgh cold!