“But hold, a lovely maid I see. Rags cannot hide her gentle grace. Alas, she is more fair than thee… Lips red as the rose, hair black as ebony, skin white as snow.” - Magic Mirror, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves

Inspiration

Disney's first princess was featured Snow White in their first feature-length animated movie. She is the fairest of them all whose beauty is defined by her inherent kindness and purity. During the film, she is tricked by her disguised stepmother into eating a poisoned apple. And she was saved by true love's kiss from her Prince Florian. I’m not one to put poisons in drinks unless you count ethyl alcohol. Since Snow White clearly survived the ingestion of the poison, through magical means or otherwise, we’ve got a special take on an appletini for her. Vodka-forward and acid-adjusted, this appletini may not be the fairest, but it’s definitely the least green (not trying to steal your look, Maleficent).

Workshopping

Apples play the biggest role in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves other than the characters themselves. So it felt appropriate to start with an appletini as the base for Snow White’s signature cocktail. Many recipes will use some sour green apple liqueur as part of their recipe which tends to make a drink brightly colored. They look a bit more poison-adjacent than what we were going for to represent Miss Pure of Heart. If Snow White is the fairest of them all, why not make an appletini that was more true to the apple? A pure representation of the apple in drink form!

Vodka is one of the purest of spirits and one that leaves the least amount of flavor after the distilling process. Purity of the princess? Check! How about something befitting of her royalty? Well, we’ve got a bottle of apple whisky that says “Royal” on it (specifically Crown Royal), so let’s throw that in there too! What’s left? Ah yes! A bit of apple juice.

Not so fast! Just any old apple juice won’t do! If we just picked the apple juice off of the shelf of a convenience store, then we’d be falling flat on those characteristic sour apple notes present in most appletinis. Since we workshopped this recipe late at night, and the stores were all closed before our charity livestream we had to take matters into our own cauldron. We used our own acid-adjusted apple juice recipe to create sour apple juice using the power of citric acid and malic acid. My expert taste testers and fellow co-hosts of the day booked it to the LaxbWithAnX and whipped up the following recipe which, according to them “tastes just like a green apple”.

Acid-Adjusted Apple Juice

• 250 ml of Unsweetened Apple Juice

• 7.5 g Malic Acid

• 1.5 g Citric Acid

Flavor Analysis

Tastes prominently like chilled Granny Smith, and sour apple juice. A slight alcoholic bite and a mildly sticky aftertaste.