Cordials from Your Kitchen: Easy, Elegant Liqueurs You Can Make & Give

In an effort to save money this past Christmas, my husband and I decided to get back to homemade gifts. What a hit our homemade liqueurs were! So, we decided it was worth the investment of buying this book and adding to our collection of recipes. This book contains delightful and different recipes that we are anxious to start making. Things like mango rum, pineapple rum, pear liqueur, cherry liqueur, the list goes on. Our friends and family are now always asking "what's brewing?" and putting in their requests for next Christmas!!! My only concern is that many of the recipes in this book contain a lot of sugar (which we try to limit.) For gifts, we use the proper recipes, but for home we do experiment with less sugar or equal (next I'll try Splenda) and have had some success. This book is fun and worth buying, but I won't share it! We've even started making fun and quirky labels on the computer (with a logo too!) to dress up the gifts. People love it! And, we now save all of our small screw top bottles (200-400 mls are perfect) so that one batch of liqueur will yield 4-6 gifts for giving.

I've made about a dozen of the cordials in this book. They are easy to make whether you use fruit or extracts and they look and taste great! I'm including some in all my holiday gift baskets this year and we are going to feature them at our Holiday Open House. Personally, I'm not a drinker but I use cordials frequently in cooking, especially desserts. This book has saved me a lot of money considering I can make a bottle of walnut liqueur for a few dollars instead of buying it...

I just started in cordial making and this book is great! I'm making a list of recipes I want to try and I think I'll be set for years to come. My wife and I made the honey cordial and it will be a staple in my house. Easy to read, too!

I haven't tried all these recipes, but the ones I did were great. Aren't cordials supposed to be sweet? Anyway, what I liked was being able to make homemade gifts quickly, and I got about three times a much for the price as I would if I bought them ready made. I especially like the spicy ones and the cranberry liqeur for the holidays.