A Cocktail Making Class at Balans – Westfield, Stratford

The run up to Christmas is one of my favourite times of year. I love the hustle and bustle and the festive goings on. What’s not so good is that my liver tends to take a battering at this time too. And to add to the battering I accept an invite to a cocktail making class at Balans, Westfield Stratford City. Bring it on, I’ll detox in the New Year *coughs*.

There are a bunch of other lovely bloggers at the class and everything we need is laid out before us. Megan Burroughs is our mixologist for the eve. I secretly hope she’ll do flipping acrobatics with the shaker, like what Tom Cruise does in the film Cocktail, but this doesn’t happen. Instead her skills are showed off in her expert knowledge and demonstration.

bloggers (from right to left): Simply Food, Adventures of a London Kiwi, Botanical Baker, Me, Pebble Soup,
Slow Food Kitchen and Cake Over the World.

We are taught various things like how to properly coat the rim of a glass with sugar or salt, how to muddle (squishing fruit with a pestle type tool) and how to ghetto-dump (contents of the shaker dumped into a glass). We make four cocktails: Berrylicious, Margarita, Red Ribbon and a Balans White Russian. My fav is Berrylicious (the recipe for this is below), but all are very good. One of the cocktails, Red Ribbon, is made in support of the Elton John Aids Foundation. It costs £9.95 and 100% of the proceeds go to the Foundation.

I learn quite a bit but might need a separate lesson in stencilling, as I confess that the snowflake stencil dusting of cocoa powder in the below pic isn’t mine, it’s Megan’s. Mine’s the one at the back with the unidentifiable splodge on top.

Balans White Russian

So we don’t get overly merry, Balans provide a decent selection of snacks: ham hoc and apricot terrine, cheese and swiss chard tart, masa (type of maize) coated calamari, a Greek platter of; houmous, olive, feta, flat bread and olives, and cute little mince pies – hiccup!

ham hock and apricot terrine

mince pies

A Balans cocktail making class is easy to do and fun. It costs £39.95 per person, which includes a welcome drink, four cocktails and snacks. 

Balans
Westfield Stratford City
Unit SU1090A, Ground Floor, 123 The Street,
Westfield Stratford City Shopping Centre, E20 1EN
Tel: 020 8555 5478
www.balans.co.uk

Thanks to Balans for the invite.

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