Revolutionize Your Cocktail Game By Rethinking Your Fruit Choices

You're eagerly trying to impress guests — or are simply craving a fancy-ish drink for yourself to enjoy at home — yet you are dismayed to discover that your kitchen stores are pretty bare. Not to fear, your hopes of mixing up and serving impressive cocktails are not lost. With a little creativity, ingenuity, and gumption, you can shake up drinks that bartending professionals could also appreciate.

Craft Gin Club emphasizes that the fruit you use in a cocktail can make or break the recipe — that's why the best bartenders make a great effort to squeeze fresh juices to make drinks. But, well, sometimes life happens, and those berries you meant to pick up at the store went forgotten. If your heart is set on a strawberry gin smash and you don't have any fruit to make the recipe, you may be surprised to learn that other ingredients can equally step up to the cocktail-making plate. You just might need to do some digging around in your kitchen's cupboards.

While fresh fruit is usually the go-to for drinks, admits Washington Post, aspiring at-home bartenders can also use jam or preserves to make cocktail recipes, even if a few extra shakes are required in order to thoroughly blend ingredients.

Simply Whisked insists a fan favorite mixes fig jam, rye whiskey, and a touch of amaro to create a drink worth celebrating. Or there's the cosmonaut cocktail recipe, which Steve the Bartender demonstrates is easy to make in a cocktail shaker; simply shake gin, lemon juice, and raspberry jam with ice, and you've got yourself a drink ready to be served in a Manhattan bar.

Additionally, encourages the Washington Post, frozen fruits are not to be frowned upon, as those frozen berries hiding in the back of the freezer can lend delicious flavors and colors to not only drinks but simple syrup, too. There's absolutely no shame in getting creative when it comes to cocktail mixing — as long as it tastes good enough to drink.