#pieandbooze #recap

So, last Thursday evening, we hosted 13 fun-loving people for a night of pie and booze at PJP Buttonwood.  We taught our guests to make their own PJP baby apple pie from scratch.  Our friend Van from Dogmaster Distillery (http://www.dogmasterdistillery.com) shared bartending skills galore and then whipped up the most delicious cocktail EV-AH.  It was an epic amount of fun and by the end of this post, you'll unquestionably want to attend our next event.  Unless you don't like pie or booze, and then this is probably the wrong blog for you anyway. We set up each person with a rolling pin, a mixing bowl, a spatula, a ball of dough, a container of peeled apples, and a baby pie tin.  Each table shared a large bowl of flour and sugar and smaller containers of nutmeg and cinnamon.

Jeanne launched into her feelings about pie dough and rolling techniques and quickly everyone was flouring their table space and rolling their dough like long-term experts.

Before long, each person had rolled and mixed and stirred and fluted and we had trays of baby pies ready for the oven.

While the pies baked, we got to the part of the evening that I had been anticipating all week...cocktail hour.  Van brought all of his supplies (including real bar glasses, which may have stolen my heart forever).  He started his part of the evening by giving us each a shot of vodka made from his still at his St. James Street location...(this completely made me re-think our intro at these sorts of events...perhaps we need more of a hook).

Van taught us all to make a Cloud 9 cocktail...which is a creamy, coffee, holy-crap-it-is-really-freaking-delicious sort of drink.  I'll leave the secrets of this cocktail to Van and my 13 new #pieandbooze friends, but I can't help but add that he garnishes the glass with chocolate sauce...which is basically just the glitter of the cocktail world, in that it makes everything instantly better.

And then we each got to practice our new skills by whipping up our own drink.

Jeanne and I exercised extreme restraint by making and drinking one cocktail each, though we secretly wanted three.  Or five.

We took copious notes on the preparation of this drink and Jeanne has asked me no less than 11 times since Thursday if I know what I did with our notes and when do I plan to whip up a batch to keep in our refrigerator.  And in the best news ever, Dogmaster Distillery will offer their vodka for sale in the next few weeks.  Is it wrong that I asked Van to Tweet me when it was ready?