Hey all, Sorry for my long time away. I've been busy and haven't had much time for exciting recipes. However, today I've got something pretty exciting. You may have seen posts about Skittles Vodka floating around the internet in the past few months. Well, I did too. So I made some. It's great.
My first batch was with the classic Skittles. I split them up by color and did each one separately. I did end up mixing yellow and green ("lemon" and "lime"), which was pretty good. But I felt that red and orange just tasted like chemicals and the purple one like cough syrup.
I went back through with the Skittles Blenders and had a much better experience. That's what I'm going to share with you.
The first thing you need to do is choose your color (or colors). I used a mix of pink (Strawberry Lime Blast) and yellow-orange (Mango Lemonade Freeze). An entire bag of Skittles will make about one and a half liters/quarts, so all of two colors makes about twenty ounces.
Some of the people who have done this did so with flimsy plastic water bottles. That seems gross. Alcohol is some pretty powerful stuff so I'm inclined to keep it in glass (or plastic bottles specifically intended to hold alcohol). I used old pasta sauce jars, as I do for just about everything.
The first thing you do is add the vodka to your jar of Skittles. They should start to melt just about immediately. If you look closely you'll be able to see the color sloughing off of them.
Let this sit for a while. The candies themselves take some time to dissolve. Furthermore, there's a good deal of waxy gunk in Skittles. You need to give that enough time to melt, then resolidify and rise to the top. I let mine sit at room temperature for two days.
Now we filter this sucker. I use coffee filters, though in the previous batch I used paper towels and they worked fine. You can see the waxy buildup has risen to the top, and there's some kind of condensation on the bottom as well that we'll filter out. Unless you have an enormous funnel you'll have to do this in stages. It strains pretty slowly so getting it all strained took me coming back to it maybe half a dozen times over the course of a day.
Filter is again. You can see the difference between once-filtered and twice-filtered vodka just by looking at them. You can also see how much gunk came out in each filtering state. I ended up filtering mine four times, though after the first two there wasn't much contaminant left.
Now it's ready! Bring it to a party and impress your friends! We ended up speculating that it would probably be fantastic with 7up or something similar; it's very sweet and just about 40 percent alcohol. It's best cold, but be warned that more gunk may condense out of it if you keep it in the freezer (which isn't really a problem, it just doesn't look as nice).
More updates soon, I hope! I have a few more waiting to go.
