Category: Cocktails and alcohol

The 15th Annual Hungryandfrozen edible gift guide with 60 recipes for you

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A jar with a ribbon around it surrounded by baubles.

Something we can all count on, or at least, that we can all count: The 15th Annual HungryandFrozen Edible Gift Guide is back! This year you have a round-up of:

  • 60 delicious gift-ready recipes
  • Many also-delicious off-the-shelf ideas if you hate cooking or are simply not up to it at this juncture
  • Gift guide suggestions and further worthy places to powerfully channel whatever consumer dollars you may have

Although it’s hellacious to format I love the work of making this annual list because it serves to disabuse you of the notion that Christmas gifts have to be things. People love food, and food gifts are nothing but upside. They have immediate practical application, they will eventually cease taking up space in the recipient’s house, and it’s a simple way to demonstrate care, appreciation, and love especially in this continually punishing economy. My fifteen-year accumulative model was getting excitingly close to three figures, but in 2025 I respect your time more than mine and have whittled down the list so you have fewer decisions to wrestle with and less scrolling.

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2 x Hoods Landing Cocktails

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Two cocktails in tall glasses with mint garnish and four books in the background

Although my debut novel Hoods Landing is now out, alive, sharing the same realm as us; I hope you’ll permit me one more literary-culinary flourish ahead of Thursday’s launch party in Auckland. For what it’s worth, despite actually being a double flourish of two cocktail recipes, I’m going to keep this relatively succinct as I am no less feverish and hectic and wild-eyed than I was eleven days ago when we launched it for the first time (and exceptionally so) in Wellington. Thus far I can tell you that the life of a novelist involves a lot of refreshing notification screens and being immensely humbled and grateful. To celebrate that launch, I made chocolate mousse; to féte Auckland, an Old Fashioned variation that I call the Hermit; plus a bonus reminder of the Hoods Landing Punch recipe that I shared on Instagram before the last launch in a fugue state of optimistic tangential self-promotion.

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Fig leaf gin

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A jar of fig gin sitting on fig leaves on a white tablecloth

Though I spent a not insignificant portion of time with my writing group on Sunday taunting the kind of ironically insubstantial literary elitism that mistakes dogmatism and exclusion for Doing Something — oh, you know the kind I mean — here I am with an undeniably impractical and feckless recipe for Fig Leaf Gin. Not that I ever promised practicality, but I try to keep things within the realm of possibility. This is an outlier — a delicious one, though, and what it lacks in justification for its own existence it does, at least, make up for in ease of execution by being very, very easy to make.

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Peppermint espresso martini

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several espresso martinis in front of a glass filled with mini candy canes

Discovery can feel like invention. When you encounter a combination of flavours so prepossessingly ravishing yet so utterly unknown to you that surely — with all your life experience and accumulated years — this must be the first of its existence? I’m not referring here to culinary colonisation and staking a flag in someone else’s heritage, I’m talking about tasting a peppermint espresso martini for the first time. What do you mean it’s extremely, publicly common? Entirely un-gatekept? There’s only so many hours in the day, but I’ve had plenty enough of them to hear about this!

I’ve quoted him before, but Pete Campbell of Mad Men really has earned his place as a patron saint of food writers when he said “turned out it already existed, but I arrived at it independently”. In the fullness of time — the week out of 38 years in which I’ve known of this flavour combination — the important thing is that I arrived at all.

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The 14th Annual Hungryandfrozen edible gift guide with 87 recipes for you

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A jar with a ribbon around it surrounded by baubles.


Despite last Christmas only having occured 27 minutes ago, it’s suddenly next Christmas – so without further existential crises let’s launch into the all-singing, all-dancing 2024 edition of a favourite tradition for the past 14 years of my 17-year-old blog, something we can all count on, or at least, that we can all count: The 14th Annual HungryandFrozen Edible Gift Guide! With 87 recipes rounded up for you!

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Tamarillo Sidecar

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Two tamarillo cocktails, a tamarillo and a red fabric rose on a white tablecloth

Cooking is about formulas and working out which jigsaw pieces you can slot in and out of the whole to make something new; but so is drinking. And when you realise how many cocktails are based on liquor + sour + sweet: daiquiris, margaritas, cosmopolitans, mojitos, gimlets, and so on, then you can be emboldened, with the right proportions, to start tinkering. In this case, the tinkering was done for me — I was served a wonderful cocktail at Caretaker and wanted to recreate it at home — but — and this is the last time I’ll say the word ‘tinkering’ — I could not resist tinkering further. Actually, it was that other classic recipe formula: reverse-engineering a trebuchet to launch you as close as possible to your desired recipe using the ingredients you have already in your pantry, which is how I landed on this Tamarillo Sidecar cocktail. That is, if I’d had white rum, it might’ve been the original tamarillo daiquiri I was served at the cocktail bar but needs must, which is an absurd thing to say when cognac is involved but — they must!

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Got lemons? Get 18 lemon recipes.

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I’ve intended to photograph and write about food for the entirety of July thus far and have either been too tired, too busy, too tired from being busy, or not blessed with photography daylight to achieve anything (other than being incredibly grumpy about my lack of blogging). After lugging a spirit-liftingly full bag of lemons back to town with me following my last visit home, it occurred to me that a jaunty interstitial in the form of a round-up of lemon recipes could temporarily countermand this issue. Naturally, it immediately created a new burden of chaotic formatting and link-hunting; after all that I’m not sure if the lemon recipes I’ve gathered are that useful, but they are at least mildly out of the ordinary to anyone expecting a lemon meringue pie here.

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Café Brûlot Ice Cream [no-churn]

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As a sedulous devotee in the field of recipe development, “what if this existing recipe was an ice cream flavour?” is a pertinent question I ask myself repeatedly, and — in the case of this café brȗlot ice cream — it’s a question I sometimes find an answer to. Repurposing one recipe into another format isn’t a lazy madlibs way to come up with ideas — although it can help – it’s more that I adore ice cream and it’s the first thing on my mind. You might as soon ask, could this recipe be a lasagne? Despite summer being my least-favoured season, ice cream is my favourite food and I like to mark the passing of each year with a new one for reasons of both personal satisfaction and benefiting from its practical cooling properties.

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Gingerbread Espresso Martini

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Despite five years in hospitality and more than triple that with a food blog where I try to convince you of my authority, some skills-based aspects of food elude me: I’ve never poached an egg convincingly, I don’t have the engineering project management qualifications required to get sourdough off the ground, and I’m abysmal at making coffee. Working a Friday rush when a customer would order a round of espresso martinis, perhaps not realising that this involved grinding everything to a halt and preparing each individual coffee shot with maddening torpor — was a particularly piquant slice of hell. When I was promoted to running a cocktail bar that resolutely didn’t have a coffee machine, we cleverly used cold brew instead in our espresso martinis — most effectively — and with this new relaxed approach I could finally appreciate the cocktail.

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Lemon Vodka Pasta

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You might well ask, how can I possibly wring further mileage out of the pairing of lemon and pasta when there’s already the Pasta with Lemon, Garlic, and Thyme Mushrooms; the Lemon Rosemary Fettuccine; and the Lemon “Parmesan” Spaghetti recipes on here for starters? It’s not just a case of if you get it you get it, but to me each of these recipes has their own personality, narrative, energy, and — importantly — flavour — and I could probably come up with another ten recipes combining lemon and pasta and argue for each of their relevance. But still, you might well ask, and I shall answer: what sets this Lemon Vodka Pasta apart is its spirited spin on the French beurre blanc sauce, where wine and vinegar are evaporated down before having butter whisked in. Here, the strong and sour components come from vodka and lemon, further adulterated with cream to give the emulsion a helping hand.

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