BANANA COCONUT RUM SMUGGLER

I’ll give you few hints about what is in this winner.

There’s banana liqueur, cream of coconut and rum. That’s not all though, there’s also lime juice! We couldn’t (well, we could, but we didn’t want to) squeeze all of the ingredients in the name, so we dropped the lime.

As with many tiki drinks, this one is a celebration of rum — it’s the backbone of the cocktail. You can’t start your Tiki Month bonanza with some limp-wristed subtle rum. That just wouldn’t do. Happily, our friends over at Carmelita’s Rum gave us some of their Dark Spiced Rum and it was up to the job. Spicy (think holidays for all the right reasons), lightly sweet and balanced, yes, this will do very nicely indeed.

Next we have banana liqueur, use your favorite. I’m sure there are great ones out there, but we made our own — because why not? That, however, is another post.

Though, the next time you have some extra brown (read: super sweet) bananas sitting around the house, don’t just make them into banana bread (or worse, throw them out), mash ’em up, add a bottle of rum and let them hang out for a week. Then add some simple syrup (made out of brown sugar) until you’re happy with the sweetness and strain the banana bits out of it.

Our next simple, or complicated, ingredient is the cream of coconut.

Alrighty, so, slight breakdown here for you. There’s coconut water (that’s the liquid inside the coconut), coconut milk (1:1 shredded coconut simmered in water), coconut cream (4:1 shredded coconut simmered in water) and cream of coconut (a, let’s be nice here, ingredient of dubious ingredients, with coconut, sugar and various stabilizers). With the Banana Coconut Rum Smuggler, we’re looking for the cream of coconut — but, I implore you, make your own.

Ready to create your own cream of coconut? It’s easy. Get a can of coconut cream (the thicker one) and add simple syrup to it. Ta da! That wasn’t so tough. The ratio that we like is somewhere around 4:1 to 3:1 of coconut cream to simple syrup. However, since you’re making your own, play with the proportions to find your favorite.

Remember: when you take the power into your own hands and make your own components and cocktails, you get to make it exactly what way you like it.

Anyway, we combine all of those lovely ingredients together with lime and voila, the first of our Tiki Month tiki cocktails!

Now, let’s get sailing with the Banana Coconut Rum Smuggler!