How to Garnish Hot Apple Cider

Video Transcript

"Hello, my name is Melissa and on behalf of Expert Village today I’m going to teach you a couple of different ways to make the perfect cup of hot apple cider. Okay, so in this clip I’ve got my oven mitts on because I’m going to take the apple cider, it’s hot, thus the oven mitts, but we’re going to learn how to garnish is once it’s ready. We’re just finishing up; again we want to microwave it two to three minutes. Better to have it warmer than cooler because it is hot apple cider, you want it to have a little bit of that steam coming off of it slightly when you take it out of the microwave, it just, and your microwave and your kitchen will eventually smell just wonderful because of the apple cider aroma. So we’ve taken this out of the microwave, it’s piping hot and you can see from the steam, it’s done it’s job, it has infused slightly with the cinnamon stick in there, and the cloves, so take these off. Now you want to get your perfect mug that you’re going to be putting this into. You can either over the sink, dump it into the mug or I like to use a ladle, just a little bit cleaner. So it is quite warm here, so you want to hold it in the one hand of course, and it’s always good to do it over the sink in case you do make a mess. Now some people like to keep the cloves in, other people like to keep the cloves out, you just don’t want to eat the cloves, it’s very important, nor do you want to eat the cinnamon stick but a lot of people also like to have the cinnamon stick in there, one for decoration, especially if you’re entertaining guests and two for flavor, it’s very, very good. So you can either put it in with the ladle like I’m doing here or again, it’s always good you can kind of dump it over the sink, again this one I’ve put the cloves in, I don’t mind them but you just have to make sure that you don’t it them, its very, very, very important. And I also like to have the garnish, the cinnamon stick in there as well. So you want to take that out, you put that in like that, put the hot container in the sink and then the fun part, actually putting some whipped cream on top, a lot of people think apple cider, whipped cream? It’s really, really good. So shake up your whipped cream, you can use any kind of whipped cream you want of course, this is just the Reddi instant whipped cream, so we put this on top, look at the steam coming off of it there, how the cold and the hot are merging, I like lots, we’re not worried about calories. And then take your ground nutmeg; take a little bit of that, always better sometimes to do it in your hand first because you never know how much is going to come out, take a little bit and then just sparkle it on top there and you have the perfect cup of micro-waveable hot apple cider. And finally if you’re having a Halloween party or kid’s party, to jazz something like this up just a little bit you can go to a toy store and get plastic bugs, any sort of bugs that you can drizzle on there, of course you’d rather have them larger than small so you can drop one right on top so that it’s very visible so that no one is going to be actually eating like little bugs, but you can get those large plastic spiders or bugs and you can kind of put one right on top and it will make it just right and give it that sort of Halloween touch. "