Making Irish cream

In years past, often I made homemade Irish cream as Christmas presents for neighbors ... and oh yeah, maybe a lil bit for ourselves as well. This year, both Don and Older Daughter requested that I make a small batch for Christmas.

The recipe I use is found in the incomparable book Cheaper and Better.

Here's the recipe. The ingredients should be added in the order listed:

• 2 eggs
• 2 cups sweetened condensed milk
• 1 teaspoon chocolate syrup
• 1 teaspoon instant coffee
• 2 cups vodka
• 2 cups heavy cream

1. Beat eggs until thick and lemon-colored. Slowly add the rest of the ingredients one at a time, beating well after each addition.

2. Pour mixture into clean dark bottles and let it rest for one week before drinking. Mixture will keep for up to 3 months in the fridge or 1 month on the pantry shelf. Yield: 46 ounces

The recipe multiplies very easily. This time, I chose to two-and-a-half times it.

Here are the ingredients:

Mixing the sweetened condensed milk into the beaten eggs. It's important to add the ingredients in the order listed, because the alcohol denatures the egg proteins. Mixing it incorrectly could end up with something like alcoholic scrambled eggs, eww.

Adding the instant coffee and chocolate syrup:

Mixing in the vodka and cream.

Whenever we come across dark-brown bottles, we keep them. Here I'm draining four cleaned bottles:

Filling the bottles can be tricky. In theory, shining a flashlight through the bottle will tell me the level of the fluid inside so I don't overflow the bottle. In reality, the bottles are so dark that the flashlight is largely useless.

Case in point.

A better technique is simply to use the volume labeled on the bottle itself (usually 750 ml), and measure the liquid as I pour it in.

After all four bottles were filled, I still had about a pint of Irish cream left over, so I just put it in a pint jar.

Then I labeled when the Irish cream would be ripe and ready to drink.

Here's the evening's loot. I put the bottles in a dark closet to ripen until Christmas. A couple of bottles will doubtless find their way into neighbors' homes.

True story: The first time I made homemade Irish cream (around 2005), we had no idea how it would taste. We tried it after returning home from a Christmas Eve candlelight service at our church. After tucking our weary children into bed, Don and I decided to break open a bottle of the homemade stuff and toast in Christmas. I remember we paused, glasses full, and wondered if we were about to poison ourselves. Then we took a sip. Absolutely delicious.

Honestly, this stuff is better than Bailey's for a fraction of the cost. Try it! It's easy and cheap, and it makes wonderful Christmas presents.

A word of warning: It's very strong. As in, don't-you-dare-think-you-can-drive type of strong. One glass of this and my cheeks are flushed. But man oh man, is it good. You'll never go back to the store-bought stuff after tasting this.