So a Khajit, an Argonian, and an Orc Walk Into a Skooma Den...

Now legal in the Ratway, the alley behind the Winking Skeever, and Washington State.

 ...and get totally blasted on skooma.

Ah yes, sweet, sweet skooma... sweet, mind-numbing, haze-inducing, brain-cell-slaughtering skooma. Loathed by uptight Imperial soldiers everywhere in Cyrodiil, you can find plenty of it while wandering the wilds of Skyrim. Buy it at any Khajit caravan, from random skooma dealers encountered on the road, or - best of all - make your own with this Real Life Skooma Recipe!

I did - and I will openly, immediately admit that this is a really weird recipe with a really odd mix of flavors. It's not for the faint of stomach or frail of liver. It's not going to be to everyone's taste. But it's as canon as anything else Lexi and I have concocted for this blog, and if you're a diehard Skyrim fan with Daedric-strength tastebuds, give this one a shot.

Skooma in-game is made from refined moon sugar. A book from Morrowind, An Alchemist's Guide to Skooma, describes the recipe in greater detail (I would seriously love to meet the game designer who wrote it). In developing my own recipe, I started with the following descriptions from the book:

In Elsweyr skooma is made from moon sugar and a poisonous herb called nightshade... the preparation of skooma requires that the alchemist dissolve some moon sugar in water and bring it to the boil. For one pint of water you should add one cup of moon sugar. Once it is boiling, add one thimble full of nightshade essence.

That right there, my friends, is simple syrup with powdered nightshade added. Straightforward, basic, and something Lexi and I have done before, in our recipes for Elsweyr Fondue and the Velvet Lachance. Reasoning that trying to make simple syrup using our own moon sugar recipe might cause some issues with melting, I fell back on the variation we came up with for the fondue:

MOON SUGAR SIMPLE SYRUP
1 cup granulated white sugar
1 cup water
1-2 Tbsp of lavender or culinary sumac

Boil sugar in water. Stir until sugar dissolves. Remove from heat immediately and add lavender or culinary sumac to taste, usually 1 or 2 Tbsp. Let cool. (If you make with lavender, we recommend straining before use to get the lavender bits out.)

Left: Sumac Simple Syrup (Secunda)
Right: Lavender Simple Syrup (Masser)

With the Velvet Lachance, we solved the issue of where we might get nightshade; the nightshade family is vast, and there are, in fact, quite a few edible plants within it: tomato and eggplant are some examples, but for spice and kick we went with peppers. And oh, there are sooo many to choose from... which ones to use?

Clockwise, starting with the fresh red pepper on the left: Thai pepper, chipotle powder, ancho chili powder, cayenne chili powder, crushed jalapeno peppers, Aleppo pepper (center), Guajillo pepper (long purplish dried pepper), Sanaam chili pepper (bottom)

This is where the flavor really comes into this recipe, and where you can go hog wild, picking and choosing as many (or as few) peppers as you wish. And I highly encourage readers to experiment on your own: we came up with flavors we liked, but there are so many more possible variations out there. Here's the basic recipe:

SKOOMA
4-6 oz. simple syrup
A pinch to a teaspoon of peppers (crushed, minced, dried, powder, a mix of peppers or a single variety)
Vodka

Mix the peppers into the simple syrup. Let sit for an hour or two. Strain. Mix with an equal part vodka, over ice or as straight shots. Lose your mind and yowl like a horny desert cat at the moon's dim light.

TIPS:

• Lavender has a stronger flavor than sumac, so will stand up to the stronger peppers.
• Don't let your base mixture sit for very long. Either drink it right away, or strain out the pepper after an hour (2 hours tops). If you let it sit, it tastes terrible.
• Fresh peppers have a milder flavor than powdered (at least the ones we tried), but may have more heat.
• Combinations that worked reasonably well were lavender and chipotle, lavender and Guajillo pepper, sumac and Aleppo pepper, and sumac and Thai pepper.
• Don't drink this without cutting it with vodka (or gin, if you want something sweeter and fruitier). It's too cloyingly sweet without being diluted.
• Goes well with Elsweyr Fondue and a need to erase the bleak lawlessness of Skyrim from your mind.

Skyrim Recipe: Elsweyr Fondue

There's a Khajit caravan that travels the roads and byways of Skyrim, appearing outside town from time to time to offer rare goods. I like to have my character stop by for a bit of moon sugar and some light conversation about the warm, exotic sands of Elsweyr, the Khajit homeland. But there's one thing I always wonder: just how does a desert kitty stay warm and groovy in the frozen wastes of Skyrim?

The answer, it turns out, is cheese fondue.

Cheese fondue and a bottle of skooma: not just for 1970's lounge cats anymore.

More specifically, Elsweyr fondue, a tasty recipe made from three simple ingredients in-game: ale, moon sugar, and an Eidar cheese wheel.

Beer? Cheese? Two of my favorite things! How, then, could I resist attempting a real world version? Well, lucky you: I couldn't.

Cheese fondue is a very simple dish with a history dating back several hundred years. It's little more than a thick cheese sauce made with beer or wine at low heat in a communal pot, into which diners dip cubes of bread. There are literally thousands of recipes built on this simple foundation. Variation comes from what type of cheese or liquor is used, what seasonings are chosen, or the addition of thickeners or emulsifiers (such as flour or egg).

As with other Skyrim-based recipes, the goal was to achieve an end result that came as close to the in-game description as possible, but was also tasty and relatively easy to make.

In this case, the first challenge came with how Elsweyr fondue is depicted in-game, as compared to what your average actual cheese sauce or cheese fondue looks like in reality. This is what game designers at Bethesda thought Elsweyr fondue should look like:

Image copyright Bethesda Game Studios.

Aside from being a liquid almost, but not quite, entirely unlike fondue... well, would you eat that? I sure wouldn't. It looks like the worst, most industrial chili ever made. If the game designers were trying to convey the bleak lawlessness of Skyrim in a single meal, I think they succeeded admirably with this one. It looks like a bowl of despair, Nord style. And it's certainly uncontaminated by cheese.

Which brings us to our next challenge: picking the right cheese. Take a look at this illustration of an Eidar cheese wheel:

Image copyright Bethesda Game Studios.

I've eaten a lot of cheese in my day, and that picture right there just screams STILTON to me. Stilton is a well-marbled blue cheese with a thick, brownish rind, lovely and creamy when at its most ripe. It goes very well with sweetish red wines and very ripe fruit... and it's definitely a stinky cheese. A wedge of the stuff, improperly sealed up, can make the inside of your fridge smell like feet, so I couldn't even imagine how rank a whole load of it would smell, bubbling away on a hot stove.

So Lexi and I decided against using just Stilton for this one. Instead, we chose a combination of cheeses for flavor, meltability, and scent. We also wanted to come up with a cheese that would melt well, becoming stable and smooth without the need for any emulsifiers, since none are called for in the game recipe.

Our family of ingredients: beer, cheese, fruit, and moon sugar.

The cheese we picked for our base was Snofrisk, a smooth, very mild, slightly tangy Norwegian cream cheese made mostly of goat's milk. We added a lovely, mild, soft French blue cheese (the front wedge in the image above) to stand in for the Eidar wheel and decided to pretend that Eidar Cheese would be a smooth, creamy, marbled goat cheese best represented by combining these two.   Add my favorite go-to amber ale (Silver City's Ridgetop Red), sumac moon sugar simple syrup... and it all melted into a magical tasty recipe that would do any Khajit proud. Here it is, in all its glory.

INGREDIENTS
Butter (optional)
1 4.4-oz. container of plain Snofrisk cheese
About 4 oz. soft, creamy blue cheese
Beer or ale
Moon sugar simple syrup (see recipe below)
Culinary sumac or lavender (to correct seasonings as needed)
Bread and/or fruit wedges for dipping

RECIPE
1. Melt a pat of butter in the top of a double boiler over medium heat. This is optional, but can help prevent sticking.
2. When the butter foams, add the Snofrisk. Whisk slowly with the butter until well blended.
3. Whisk in beer or ale, 4 oz. at a time or so, until the texture is thick and creamy, somewhere between the consistency of a melted milkshake and unwhipped whipping cream.
4. Add the blue cheese in bits and gradually whisk in until smooth.
5. Add a tablespoon or two of the moon sugar simple syrup. This will sweeten the fondue, so check to taste before adding a whole bunch of it.
6. If your moon sugar simple syrup was on the mild side, add lavender or sumac a teaspoon at a time to adjust seasonings.
6. If your fondue is a bit too thick, thin it with more beer or ale.
7. Mess it forth into a pre-warmed earthenware bowl or your favorite fondue pot, and eat by dipping in sliced apples or chunks of lightly toasted bread!

It should look more or less like this, a little thicker if you wish.

 MOON SUGAR SIMPLE SYRUP
1 cup sugar
1 cup water
Several Tbsp of lavender or culinary sumac

Awhile back Lexi and I came up with a very serviceable recipe for moon sugar based on a microwave hard candy recipe. Initially I wanted to add the straight moon sugar to this recipe, but Lexi noted that we might have difficulties with it melting smoothly, and would end up with cheese sauce with bits of half-melted moon sugar floating in it rather than a smooth, creamy, dippable sauce. So instead, I took her advice and opted to make a simple syrup instead.

The process is simple: boil 1 cup of granulated white sugar in 1 cup of water. Stir until sugar dissolves. Remove from heat immediately and add lavender or culinary sumac to taste, usually 1 or 2 Tbsp. Let cool and use as you would in any simple syrup recipe. (If you make with lavender, we recommend straining before use to get the lavender bits out.)

MORE NOTES
Lexi and I made two different kinds of moon sugar, one for each of Skyrim's moons (Masser and Secunda). One uses lavender, the other culinary sumac; each have their own flavor qualities, and we kept this in mind when choosing ingredients for the fondue. Lavender makes a very floral, pretty flavor, but it's very strong. Sumac is more musky, like one of those flavors you've met before but just can't put your tongue on it... it's also more subtle than the lavender.

So for the first workup of this recipe I chose a milder French cheese and a solid, not-very-hoppy amber ale to go with the sumac without drowning out the flavor. The breads were chose were a dark rye (as might be found in the Nordic wilds) and an Italian artisan loaf, cut into large chunks and lightly toasted on a baking sheet at about 325F for 10 minutes or so. Round it out with slices of a firm, fleshy apple (like Granny Smith or Fuji) and you can dine with the coolest cats on the tundra.

And don't forget the skooma...

Skyrim Food: Apple Cabbage Stew

Pardon me while I stop mid-fight to eat 20 bowls of Stew.

Apple Cabbage Stew.  Sounds tasty, yeah?  Well evidently in Skyrim the only seasoning anyone uses is Salt.  That's fine if you're living in a fantasized medieval Nordic land, but for the rest of us non-Stoics with more than 2 tastebuds who don't actually like eating raw dog meat and mammoth snout, getting this recipe to the Tasty Place was tricky.

The more posts we do, the more Gwen and I feel like what makes our site special is our overwhelming (some would say unhealthy) obsession with canon.  A lot of food blogs are written by cool, well-balanced people with interesting interpretations on recipes.  We're not those people. 

We actually debated making a common version of this stew that exists in the real world.  There was discussion about things like chicken stock, onions, thyme, red wine; ingredients that would make it conventionally tasty and easy to make. 

Easy?  Conventional?  Non-Canon?  BLASPHEMY!!

I  have a giant monkey brain that I use to think through creative problems.  Three ingredients?  No seasoning but salt?  No problem.  Chicken stock is for the weak.

Liberties were taken with the quantities and preparations of the three main ingredients, but no additional foods or seasonings have been added.  The final redaction is a riff on traditional Northern European sauerkraut dishes.  Sauerkraut (preserved cabbage) would be a very likely preparation in Skyrim.

Ingredients: Apple, Cabbage, Salt.

• 3 or 4 Sweet Apples, like Honeycrisp or Red Delicious
• 2 lb Salt-Cured Sauerkraut, Canned sauerkraut won't do.  Get the naturally cured stuff in the refrigerator section at the store made with Cabbage and Salt.
• 4 Cups Apple Juice or Apple Cider, The sweeter, the better; you're not going to add any sugar.
• Salt to taste

Found these authentic Skyrim apples in a barrow. They look like they'd been there for a couple millennia.

Directions

1. Empty the sauerkraut into a strainer, rinse and drain well.  Squeeze out extra moisture with your hands.
2. Dice all but one of the apples
3. Add the drained sauerkraut, apple juice and diced apples to a large pot and simmer over low heat for 3.5 hours
4. Dice the final apple and add it to the stew
5. Simmer another 30 minutes or until the stew is a nice dark golden color.
6. Salt to taste

It's actually pretty good - it's a crunchy sweet-n-sour hot dish that can double as a side to pork. It's also vegan.  The sauerkraut absorbs up the sugars from the apples and apple juice and it mellows out the tang of the kraut.  The longer you cook it, the more caramelized the stew will become, and the sweeter and darker it will get.

Skyrim Treats: Moon Sugar

Moon Sugar; sweet and mysterious

Wander the roads and byways of Skyrim, and eventually you're bound to run into a rough encampment by the side of the road on the way into town. These clusters of tents are temporary trading posts set up by the nomadic Khajiiti, a feline race from the exotic desert land of Elsweyr. Here you can buy and sell goods many merchants in town will avoid, including the less-than-licit moon sugar.

Pure, uncut, from the wilds of Elsweyr. The first sample is always free.
Image source Bethesda Game Studios.

Moon sugar is described as a crystal made from the canes of certain grasses in Elsweyr. It has magical properties, can be used as an alchemy ingredient, and is a strong narcotic. It's illegal in much of Tamriel: in Morrowind many shopkeepers won't even do business with you if you're carrying the stuff (not so in the more lawless land of Skyrim). Refine it, and you have skooma.

The in-game picture shown above depicts pale but not colorless lumps or chunks of various sizes. It reminded us immediately of rock candy.  Figuring that nobody really wants to wait a whole week for traditional rock candy to crystallize, eventually we found this easy microwave hard candy recipe, upon which we based the recipe below.

The land of Elsweyr is an exotic, somewhat mysterious desert land with a rich religious tradition, including some pretty hefty mythology about the moons of Tamriel: Masser and Secunda. There's plenty of in-game talk about Moon Sugar, but nothing specifically about which one, so it made the most sense to do a version for each moon.  

Masser and Secunda
Image Source Bethesda Game Studios

Masser is floral and sweet, while Secunda is dark and mysterious.  The resulting Moon Sugar(s) should be laden with subtle flavors which seem familiar but foreign to the average Nord, as if one can't quite put their tongue on just what they're tasting...

Early recipes started with vanilla sugar and vanilla-cardamom sugar (vanilla bean pods and/or cracked cardamom pods scraped into a cup or two of sugar and left for a week to absorb the spices). That makes a good base, but I learned after a few trials that plain hard candy made this way will have a honeylike taste which tends to overwhelm the mildness of the vanilla. So it was back to the drawing board.

Eventually I came up with two good variations. The first was made with lavender sugar (made by putting two Tbsp of culinary lavender in with the vanilla sugar and letting it sit for a week, then sifting out the lavender). The end result is subtle and floral, with a lovely translucent golden color to it.

Top: Sumac Moon Sugar (Secunda)
Bottom: Lavender Moon Sugar (Masser)

I realized after I made it, however, that at least one of the recipes we came up with should fit the in-game Khajiit culture where it's made: dry, desert lands, exotic, distant, hot. Lavender is lovely, but it's a much more European herb: I always think of France when I think of lavender, and Lexi always thinks of the tundra around Whiterun. A better analog for Elsweyr would be some place like Arabia or North Africa, and the spice would be something grown and used heavily in the region. 

It also occurred to me that any flavor we chose would have to fit in with a future Elsweyr Fondue recipe, which uses Moon Sugar as an ingredient.  So instead of another sweet, floral herb found on the roads of Skyrim, we used Sumac.

I can hear you now: "What the hell is sumac?? Isn't that the poisonous stuff that gets you all itchy if you run into it in the woods??"

Well, that's poison sumac, yes... but culinary sumac is an entirely different animal. (Well, plant, really.) It's a small shrub which grows in tropical and subtropical zones across Africa, in dry desert lands much like the Khajiit homeland. The fruit is dried and ground into a rich purplish-reddish powder and used in Middle Eastern cooking. It's a little bit lemony, a little like cumin, and a little bit delicious and unfamiliar.

Here's the final recipe. For the Masser version, leave out the sumac.

MOON SUGAR
1 cup vanilla, vanilla-cardamom, or lavender sugar (use standard white sugar only)
1/2 cup light corn syrup
1 Tbsp sumac (for the Secunda version only)
Vegetable oil (a flavorless oil like canola) or vegetable shortening
1-2 Tbsp powdered sugar

Oil or grease a jelly roll pan. Mix the flavored sugar and corn syrup in a microwave-safe bowl.

Cover tightly with plastic wrap and microwave for 3 minutes. Remove from microwave and stir. Cover again and microwave for another 2 minutes. Add the sumac at this point, if you're making the Secunda version.

WARNING: SUGAR WILL BE EXTREMELY HOT!!!

Remove from microwave, remove plastic wrap, and pour mixture onto oiled/greased jelly roll pan.

You can dust with powdered sugar at this point, but there's an easier way. See below.

Let cool until hard. Break into large chunks. Put the large chunks into a heavy-duty freezer bag, seal, and break them by tapping firmly with the side of a wooden spoon. Add powdered sugar to the bag and shake to coat pieces.

Store in an airtight container.

We can neither confirm nor deny that this recipe will have you yowling to the full moon like a wild feline on a hot summer's night. You'll just have to try it yourself.

Skyrim Cocktail #3: The Cliff Racer

The Cliff Racer from Talen-Jei at the Riften Bee & Barb

This is the third and final drink in the succession of Talen-Jei's Skyrim cocktails: guaranteed to aid you in your quest to drink yourself to Oblivion. You can read recipes elsewhere on this blog for the White Gold Tower and the Velvet Lachance. As noted earlier, these drinks are redactions based on the in-game descriptions from Talen-Jei at the Bee and Barb in Riften. 

...Last, and only for the bravest of souls, we have the Cliff Racer, which is Firebrand Wine, Cyrodiilic Brandy, Flin, and Sujamma.

Both of the previous drinks we did were elegant, beautiful, fanciful drinks. This one proved the hardest to figure out - it has the most fictional ingredients, and we just couldn't wrap our heads around what it should be.

We started by researching the game history of the drink and the ingredients.

Cliff Racers are half-avian, half-reptile monsters of Vvardenfell in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. This is ostensibly where the drink gets its name. Cliff Racers are something like perpetually cranky pterodactyls. They are highly aggressive and tend to ambush the player, attacking in swarms.

• Firebrand Wine was the hardest to research. Other than being the subject of a side quest for the Thieves' Guild quest line in Skyrim, it was pretty open to interpretation.
• Cyrodiilic Brandy is clearly well... brandy. It's expensive and imported.
• Flin is also an expensive import: an Imperial Whiskey with few negative side effects that is often the subject of contentous exorbitant pricing.
• Sujamma is a potent Dunmer liquor highly valued as a strength potion.

So let's see.... expensive brandy and whiskey, that's not too tough to find. Some sort of fancy wine or spirits...firebrand=firewater...?? Something spicy or cinnamon flavored, perhaps? Lastly... a Strength potion. Hm... a strength potion. A stren-...Wait, Wha-!? WTF?!




OH MY GOD IT'S RED BULL.




SUJAMMA IS A FRACKING RED BULL.


We quickly came to the disturbing realization that this drink is the Skyrim equivalent of a Jaeger Bomb. Quickly redubbed the White Trash Tower and the Skyrim Cart Bomb, we set about the dubious business of designing a drink that we'd be embarrased to order in public.

Not being huge fans of Red Bull, it took a LOT of tries, and a lot of drinks down the drain to get this to a point that it was drinkable. I think it was more because of the Red Bull than the actual mix or recipe. Gwen and I...well, we don't care much for Red Bull, it seems.

By the way, you know what they say about the more drunk you are, the less you care about what you're drinking? It's not true. I was plastered and every sample still tasted like licking the inside of a double-wide. From 1970.

In the end, we came up with a recipe that is suitably trashy, alcoholic and energizing. This drink is served as a bomb shot, ie: a tall glass of mixer into which is dropped a shot of some high proof spirit. Because how else would you serve a classy drink like this?

Unfortunately (or fortunately, if you like), one shot didn't really make it as strong as Talen-Jei's description inferred, so we figured the answer was the solution to all of life's little problems: ADD MORE ALCOHOL. Double bomb: 1 Red Bull + 2 Shots.

"Only for the bravest of souls" is right. Be warned that if you don't like Red Bull, it's gonna taste like ass. For lovers of Red Bull, it's not bad. The cinnamon really works. Trust me when I tell you that there's no way this can taste worse than some of our failed unholy recipe testing attempts (NEVER drink box-merlot+cheap blackberry brandy+red bull+cheap whiskey unless you like drinking pee).

Not for the faint of heart.

Recipe:
1 Red Bull in a pint glass (Sujamma)
1 Shot Goldschlager or Cinnamon Schnapps (Firebrand Wine)
1/2 Shot Good Brandy (Cyrodilic Brandy - sub fruit brandy)*
1/2 Shot Good Whiskey (like Jameson)*
*Note that if you're really feeling it, you can make it a triple by changing the recipe to 1 full shot each of brandy and whiskey. Just remember that if it comes back up, the Red Bull will too.

Serve it with the shots on the side, or just make a big pitcher and fill your ale hat with it for the NasCART finals. Recommended food pairings: Doritos, Apple Cabbage Stew or Hungry Man Dinners. Don't forget your WhiteSnake Greatest Hits Cassette!! Or just loop Ragnar the Red over and over again on your console.

Skyrim Cocktail #2: The Velvet Lachance

The Velvet Lachance

Last week on FeastyGeeks... we posted our recipe for the first of three Skyrim cocktails, the White Gold Tower. This week, Lexi and m'self proudly present number two: the Velvet Lachance, named for Lucien Lachance, the former Speaker of the Black Hand from Oblivion. Talen-Jei describes the Velvet Lachance thusly:

...a mixture of blackberry, honey, spiced wine, and a touch of nightshade. Perfectly safe, I assure you.

For this recipe, we enlisted the help of our friend-and-guest-barista Jeff (of Jeff's Chicken Noodle Soup fame), a fine young man whose awesomeness is rivaled only by his height.

Being an assassins guild, any drink named for the Black Hand should be just a little dangerous but pleasant and smooth - at first. A few sips in, you realize that you got a little more than you bargained for; is it poison? What is that taste? The final notes must be mixed with pleasure and the realization that you feel a sting like the cold steel of a blade discovered too late.

This time, all the in-game ingredients exist in the real world. The 'spiced' wine used was a Port, redolent of dark, gothic plots and old crumbling estates. The juice of canned blackberries in light syrup gave a nice blackberry flavor without adding too much sweetness or any berry seeds. If you must use commercial syrup, apply caution since they can easily become overwhelmingly sweet.

One of the ingredients, however, is definitely poisonous: nightshade. Since we're not interested in killing anybody (outside of the game, anyway), we had to figure out an analog for the nightshade. As with the Dragon's Tongue from the White Gold Tower, we thought about whether or not we should try to emulate the plant from the game, or figure out a real world substitute:

Nightshade. Image copyright Bethesda, via the Elderscrolls Wiki.

I first considered using an edible daylily. Added to the drink as a garnish, it would probably look very lovely. But daylilies aren't in season here right now, and my spider sense told me that we really wanted something that would serve as an ingredient, not as decoration.

Hello Wikipedia! With a little more research, I found that despite its poisonous nature, there are quite a few plants within the nightshade family that are edible. Eggplant, tomatoes, and potatoes make the list, along with a surprising ingredient possibility: chili peppers.

The idea seemed weird on the surface: chili powder has a distinct flavor and scent, and we wondered if it would blend with the other ingredients. I suggested chipotle as a possibility, since the smoky flavor seemed a reasonable pairing with the sweet blackberry and red wine.

Our first text mixtures didn't work at all. The ratio of chili powder to everything else was high enough that the flavor of chili was overwhelming. We thought of using cayenne, just for the bite, but we didn't have any.

And then Jeff miraculously fixed everything.

Jeff works as a barista at a local coffee chain. He's made every coffee drink under the sun, and he's damn good at it. Not long ago he started experimenting with chocolate chili pepper mochas, heavy on the dark chocolate syrup with just a touch of chili powder. The biggest challenge was figuring out how much chili powder to add, but after some practice he got it just right. Jeff's chili mochas are heady and delicious, much like a traditional Mexican chocolate.

The trick is to add just the lightest, barest dusting of chili powder on the surface of the drink. To get the right amount, Jeff puts about 1/16 of a teaspoon of chipotle in the palm of his hand, takes a tiny pinch with his fingers, and sprinkles it sparingly.
We had just the right blend of honey, wine, and blackberry. Jeff's chipotle powder elevated it to perfection. Here's the final recipe:

The Velvet Lachance
1 part port wine
1 part blackberry juice or flavored syrup (NOT blackberry pancake syrup!!)
Honey
Chipotle powder

Ingredients: blackberry, honey, wine

Drizzle about a 1/4" to 1/2" honey in the bottom of the glass.

Honey in the bottom of the glass

Mix the port wine and blackberry juice in a cocktail mixer, then pour into the glass. Gently stir some of the honey into the juice/wine mixture, but don't mix all of it in - leave a layer of honey at the bottom of the glass.

Chipotle powder dusted on top

Add the lightest, barest pinch of chipotle chili powder to the surface of the drink. We're talking hardly any here, just the faintest dusting, enough so that you can smell the smokiness of it, but not enough to be able to taste it. (We recommend using Jeff's pinch method, as outlined above.

Let it sit for a minute or two, and enjoy.

The chipotle is the stroke of genius in this drink. After a few minutes, the powder starts to sink into the liquid, eventually sticking to the layer of honey at the bottom. If you've gotten the amount right, you shouldn't be able to taste the chipotle at all, just note a slight whiff of smokiness.

A few moments after taking a sip, our lips started to tingle and burn - the drink has bite, like the sting of an assassin's blade or a brew you realize only too late was poisoned. It gets sweeter the further down you go, as the honey gradually mixes in. It ends with a sting in its tail: the final swallow is an unexpectedly spicy taste of honey laced with smoky heat.

The Night Mother would be proud.

Skyrim Cocktail #1: The White Gold Tower

The White Gold Tower

There is a damp waterfront town in the world of Skyrim by the name of Riften. In the middle of town there is an inn called the Bee & Barb, run by two Argonians: the green-crested Talen-Jei, and the vaguely dinosaurlike Keerava. Ask Talen-Jei what's on the menu, and he describes three drinks to the player: the White Gold Tower, the Velvet Lachance, and the Cliff Racer.

Drink recipes? IN the game? It's Skyrim! And it's Alcohol! Resistance is futile. Lucky you!

This post is the first in a series of all three drinks.



Lexi and I always put a great deal of thought and research into comestibles we redact from fictional sources. We're obsessed with canon, and The White Gold Tower was no exception. Our goals for coming up with the Bee & Barb drinks were to create concoctions that are delicious and yet still embody the spirit of both the game while sticking religiously to the drink's in-game description.

We started with the verbatim in-game description, from Talen-Jei himself:

...we have the White Gold Tower, which is heavy cream with a layer of blended mead, lavender, and Dragon's Tongue on top.

This is a drink which sounds sweet, smooth, floral, and elegant. I had visions of the ancient, somewhat mysterious nobility of the extinct Ayleids, as embodied by the slender spire rising pale and proud above the walls of the Imperial City.

The ingredients seemed straightforward enough, with at least three of them readily available in the real world (mead, lavender, and heavy cream).

Rustling up some Dragon's Tongue proved to be the first challenge. What is it, and is there any comparable analog in the real world? As it turns out, there are a couple of plants named Dragon's Tongue out there. One of them is an heirloom bean, the other a house plant of questionable edibility. The bean is edible, but neither plant actually looks anything like the plant found while wandering the wilds of the Skyrim universe. Rather than the tiny flowers found on real Dragon's Tongue plants, the Skyrim Dragon's Tongue is a tall, orchid-like affair.

Dragon's Tongue, Skyrim. Image: Bethesda Game Studios, via the Elder Scrolls Wiki.

With this wild image in mind, Lexi set off to find a comparable edible orchid that we might use for garnish. Her inquiries led her to Emerald City Orchids, where a very helpful young gent by the name of Ross (a Skyrim fan himself!) helped her to find a number of similar orchids but none that were exactly the same. Here's where you can get a little creative: since the flower in the game is an amalgamation of the features from various orchids but isn't a real bloom in and of itself, there are lots of options for finding a similar flower. We wound up using a sexy orange Cymbidium.


For the lavender, we debated a few options: lavender-flavored syrup, lavender-infused simple syrup, or lavender-infused vodka. Lexi picked up a pre-made lavender syrup, but it tasted too much like soap. In the end I decided to make a lavender-infused simple syrup (because drinks shouldn't leave bits of lavender in your teeth), per the following recipe:

Lavender Simple Syrup
1 cup water
1 cup granulated sugar
2 Tbsp dried culinary lavender

Put all ingredients in a small saucepan. Bring to a near-boil over medium high heat. Reduce heat and simmer for five minutes. Remove from heat. When cooled, strain into a clean jar or other lidded container and refrigerate.

As for mead, there are several brands on the market, each with different qualities. I picked up a Sky River semi-sweet mead. An initial taste test left me thinking that, while not as cloyingly sweet as some meads can be, the drink needed a much stronger honey flavor, and the Sky River was too light. So I suggested that Lexi pick up a bottle of Chaucer's. She also found some dark mead by Hidden Legend Winery so we could mix and match (Talen-Jei does say it's made with "blended mead", after all).

Talen-Jei describes the drink as being heavy cream with the mead and lavender floated on top, but Lexi and I suspected that the lighter lipids in the cream would layer the drink the opposite way, with the cream on top and the mead on the bottom. Initial mixes showed some immediate issues: the cream must be heavy cream (36% milkfat), because a lighter cream, half-and-half, or whole milk will curdle right away, leaving the drink a sweet, clumpy, clotted disgusting mess.

DON'T CROSS THE CREAMS!!

After a few botched attempts, we had the brilliant idea of doing a float over the back of a spoon. The result was infinitely more appetizing:

Heavy cream float on light mead

Once Lexi had the pour down pat, we spent more time tinkering with various mixtures and ratios, and this was the final recipe we came up with.

White Gold Tower
1 part mead (all one brand, or a mix of brands)
1 part lavender simple syrup
Heavy cream (traditional 36%)
Edible orchid

Pour the meads into the glass, letting them mix on their own (if you're using more than one mead).

Pour in the lavender syrup.

Invert a metal teaspoon over the liquid, bracing the tip against the side of the glass; slowly pour the cream over the back of the spoon until it's formed a layer in the mead about 1/4" to 1/2" deep.
Float the orchid carefully on the top.



The White Gold Tower is a golden, creamy drink, with silky textures and a shimmery, amber look to it. It's very, very sweet, best taken in small amounts, as a dessert drink or a shot. It's also quite strong.

With time, the layers of mead, cream, and lavender will swirl and settle beautifully.

Don't skimp on the lavender syrup: it adds the right floral flavor, and stands up against the strong taste of the mead. The milk fat in the cream helps balance the intense sweetness of the mead plus the simple syrup. Lexi and I recommend testing this drink with different meads - one at a time, blends, dark and light, as many as you like. Cut back a bit on the lavender syrup for more emphasis on the honey, or use lighter meads.