Sunday, September 19, 2010

Soda Jerk

On a trip to Philly last month, I was lucky enough to be staying in a hotel super close to the amazing Franklin Fountain! An old time soda shop selling had made sodas, phosphates and ice creams all in a super quaint building with a an retro radio kicking out jazz age hits. Now as some people know I'm an old school straight edge girl as well as a fancy quaintrelle, so this place was perfect for me, and sent me back home with dreams of sugar plum sodas dancing in my head.

This week Dusty surprised me with a box of flower flavored sodas to flavor drinks and pastries with (to me there is no group of flavors more quaintrelle than flowers, pretty, old school, rare and fancy).
Last night we finally splashed out on a Soda Stream, so with that and our growing syrup collection we're well on our way to a home soda fountain of our own!

My first drink is a mix of my floral flavor favorites, and a love of New York egg creams I developed since moving to the States. I'm calling it the floral egg cream and it's a cinch to whip up for parties, friends or just for yourself!

 Floral Egg Cream
1oz Flower syrup (I'm using the Monin syrups)
2oz milk
Fill the rest of the glass with soda water
Stir and serve!
(if you have an extra frothy rose or violet egg cream, why not sprinkle with candied petals to garnish?)

So far I've tried this with lavender and with jasmine syrups and they were both amazing, still waiting on my violet and rose syrups to arrive for my next flower mixes. I'll let you all know when we come up with some new soda successes for any one else interested in some home soda magic!

5 comments:

  1. So awesome! Glad you like it, we've always thought about getting one someday. I looked at those Monin syrups -- what, you didn't order the GINGERBREAD SYRUP?! Talk about a soda needed for fall!

    Have you tried making up a whole bottle of soda at a time, or are you just using the soda water to mix one glass at a time?

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  2. I think we might need that in the next batch!

    At the moment we've been making it a glass at a time. We picked up one of those measuring shot glasses like they use to measure cocktails, and just fill that up and pour it in the glass. I figure that should help keep the bottles clean, and make it easy to have a ton of flavors on hand at a time. The machine came with a few flavors to mix into the bottle that we still need to try though.

    The nice thing with the syrups has been that they aren't too strong or too sweet, and I have to say the water came out super bubbly, maybe even more so than I thought it would at first! (I just hope Emily can forgive us our increased soda consumption!)

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  3. Well, she'll still give you the stinkeye...but to heck with her and her WATER WATER ONLY WATER. Good point on keeping the bottles clean! I hadn't thought of that.

    Also - Ikea syrups make great soda, I think I mentioned it to Dusty. I was making soda a while back and I loved both the lingonberry and elderflower for sodas. I also made my own syrups - pink lemonade was my favorite!

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  4. Ah yeah! We need to get more Elderberry badly! I've never tried making my own syrups, but Dusty's pretty good at it. He was talking about making some one weekend, though your pink lemonade sounds amazing. How easy is it to keep the home made syrups on stand by or is it more of a drink it soon kinda deal?

    This stuff is so dangerously addictive.

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  5. I kept them in the fridge and they lasted forever. If it's mostly sugar, as far as I know the sugar will preserve it!

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