I’m not the girliest girl on the planet, but I do love me a pink cocktail. And if it’s fuchsia, that’s even better! This particular pink cocktail came to life because there have been a lot of prickly pears available at the fruit stands this week and I had never used them in a cocktail before, so I was curious. I picked up a couple to play with them and see what they tasted like. From all the reading I had done, I expected them to taste somewhat like watermelon, kiwi and cumber had a lovechild, which was fairly accurate.

For those not familiar with what a prickly pear looks like, here they are growing in their native climate:

For the puree, I didn’t want to put the fruit in the blender, because prickly pears have a lot of tiny, black seeds, and I had read that if you use the blender method to get your puree, it can taste a tad bitter. So instead I took a fine mesh strainer and pushed the fruit through the strainer with a spatula until I had eliminated all the seeds. At that point, I had myself a nice puree to work with.

This is what the inside of the fruit looks like once it’s peeled. Note all the little black seeds.

The next step was figuring out what to make with my puree. I remembered having a few prickly pear margaritas back in the day, but I wanted to go a different route. I decided that sticking to a lighter spirit would help to keep the light flavors of the fruit intact, so I went with a Pisco for my base spirit. For those unfamiliar with Pisco, it’s a grape-based distilled spirit native to Peru. I have had a number of Piscos recently. Many of them are not good. At best, they taste like a decent version of Grappa, at worst, they taste like jet fuel. The Pisco I used is Capurro Pisco which is produced in Nazca, Peru. It is quite delicate and floral, with a very smooth finish. There was no burn at all. It’s truly lovely stuff and I highly recommend it.

For the finishing touch on my cocktail I made a nifty little stencil using a print out of the Capurro logo, which is a hummingbird. The hummingbird is a powerful symbol in Peruvian culture and the Spanish name for it is Colibrí, hence the name of our drink. To make a stencil, just print out whatever image you want to use. Make sure it’s small enough to fit over a standard sized cocktail glass, but not too small that you have lots of fine details that get lost in the design. Place a small take-out soup container lid over the image and trace around it with an X-Acto knife. You can then use a number of liquids in a mister to create a colorful image on your cocktail. In this case, I used Angostura Bitters because they have a nice orange color, which was reminiscent of the Capurro logo. Stencils are an easy way to give any egg white cocktail a fancy finish.

It’s a little labor-intensive, but this cocktail was well worth the trouble. If you do a number of the prickly pears up at once, you can save the puree for a few days and do multiple cocktails with it. Hope you enjoy and let me know how it goes!

Colibrí de Nazca

2 oz Capurro Pisco

1 oz Lime Juice

3/4 oz Simple Syrup

1/2 oz Prickly Pear purée

1 Egg White

Angostura Bitters

Place all ingredients except the bitters in a cocktail shaker. Shake without ice until egg whites are thick and frothy (if you don’t want to dry shake for so long, you can use one of these bad boys). Add ice and shake for 10 seconds. Double strain into a cocktail coupe and using your stencil, spritz Angostura bitters over the top, creating your image on top of the drink.