Festive Champagne Punch

Hi, I'm Joe Campanale for eHow.com. Today, we're going to make one of my favorite cocktails for entertaining. It's called a champagne punch. One of the reasons I love the champagne punch is that it's a great to clear out your liquor cabinet and clear out your pantry if you have any extra fruit that's lying around, any, you know, any dusty bottle of liquor in the back. Just throw it in there and create something that's new and different, delicious and unique each time. But. if I'm going to start with completely fresh, I really like to start with some fresh cut pineapple, throw that right into your punch bowl, it's about a half a pineapple. We have two oranges, and I really love to use these amarena cherries. You see they're black cherries in their natural syrup. They're different from those red ones that you see at the market because there's no added food coloring, no artificial flavors. So, let's do ten of these. And if you can find amarena cherries, you could totally use fresh cherries or frozen cherries. Maybe just a few more. And then about half a cup of sugar. So, the sugar's great for muddling. We're going to use a muddler and this is a perfect muddler. It's a wooden muddler and it's not painted. Don't get the painted ones because eventually that paint is going to flake off and you're going to drink it and you really don't want to be drinking that stuff. So, once you start muddling, you just want to push it down, and twist. And what's going to happen is that the sugar is going to attach to the fruit, and sort of act as sand paper and be really abrasive and help extract some of these extra fruit juices. Another thing I like to do is use whatever fruit is fresh and in season by you. Pineapple and orange is great because you can always get that at your market. But if there's something that's looking really good, in your farmers market, it's local, by all means, use it. All right. So, we finished muddling, and you just want to add twelve ounces of brandy or cognac. I'm just going to eyeball it because I made this quite a few times. And then six ounces of maraschino liqueur. So maraschino liqueur is a sweet Italian liqueur that's made from cherries. And it has no artificial flavorings. It's really delicious and very versatile. It comes in this wicker bottle. Three, four, five and six. Terrific. Now, you can cover this with plastic and set it aside and put it in the refrigerator. You let it sit for four hours. It really gets even more delicious. All the flavors melt. But if not, you can, you just serve it up right now. Just want to give it a good stir. And it's kind of like a champagne sangria. OK. So, you take a white wine glass, add a few rocks to it. Take your ladle, and you want to get a lot of liquid and just a little bit of fruit in there. And just top it off with your favorite champagne or prosecco. And then I like to garnish it with a little bit of orange and a wedge of pineapple right there and then maybe a cherry or two just floating around. There you go. Now what is more festive than that? A champagne punch that you can make for your friends. Just pour out the prosecco or the champagne right at the end so you have a really nice frothy drink that you can make ahead of time. So, experiment, have some fun, make some champagne punches, any kind of punch you want to do at home, and tune into eHow.com for more. Cheers.