Our final frozen cocktail recipe happens to be one of our most recent favorites! Nole has been making delicious frozen granitas out of fresh fruit for years at home, so I don’t know why it took so long for us to add booze to one. But I’m glad we did. It’s the perfect way to use abundant in-season fruit – in this case, blackberries! – Andrew

Blackberry St-Germain Granita

4 Cups Blackberries
1 Cup St-Germain
1/3 Cup Sugar
1 Tablespoon Lemon Juice
A pinch of kosher salt

Purée the blackberries, St-Germain, sugar, lemon juice, and salt with a cup of water in a blender until smooth. Strain through a fine-mesh sieve into a 9 x 13″ metal baking pan, pressing on the solids to squeeze out as much liquid as possible. Freeze the mixture until the edges begin to set, then use a fork to scrape, breaking up the frozen sections into light flakes. Freeze, scraping and breaking up mixture every 20–30 minutes, until it resembles fluffy shaved ice, about 2–4 hours. Serve with a spoon.

Illustration by Dinara Mirtalipova for Oh So Beautiful Paper

We made this recipe both with and without St-Germain, and we both agree: with St-Germain is better. The succulent fruitiness of the blackberries is a perfect match for St-Germain’s robust floral notes, and the St-Germain adds just enough alcohol to give the granita some oomph without overwhelming it as a dessert. St-Germain, as a liqueur, also has a much lower proof than a liquor, which is perfect for a dessert like this – alcohol freezes at a much lower temperature than water, so too much alcohol in the recipe will keep the drink from freezing properly. Not this recipe: it came out just fine, fluffy and crunchy and delicious.

Calligraphy by Lauren Saylor of A Fabulous Fete

Styling by Nole Garey for Oh So Beautiful Paper

Photos by Sweet Root Village for Oh So Beautiful Paper

In hoity-toity cocktail circles, the blender has become something of a joke. It’s too closely associated with the dark years of the 1980s and 1990s, when frozen drinks were sickly sweet and garishly colored from artificial mixers. But blended drinks go back – way back, to the mid-1800s, when drinks like the Absinthe Frappe were all the rage. Let’s reclaim another one: the Frozen Daiquiri.  – Andrew

Frozen St-Germain Daiquiri

2 oz Bacardi Rum
1 oz Lime Juice
1/2 oz St-Germain
1/2 oz Rich Simple Syrup

Combine all the ingredients in a blender with an equal amount of crushed ice. Start to blend at the lowest setting and slowly add more crushed ice, a bit at a time, until the drink starts to fold over on itself. Pour into a chilled glass and enjoy!

Illustration by Dinara Mirtalipova for Oh So Beautiful Paper

This is an easy enough technique once you’ve mastered it, but plenty easy to screw up. I recommend practicing ahead of time so you’ve nailed it down once it’s time to serve your guests. I definitely screwed up a few batches before I got the right consistency down, watering down the drink with too much ice or not blending enough and leaving the drink full of big ice chunks. The ideal frozen daiquiri is smooth enough to sip easily through a straw, but still with enough body to chew on. (As a texture eater, I love chomping on those micro-ice crystals.) It should taste just like a St-Germain daiquiri that you’d shake with ice – sweet and tart and floral – but feel like a smoothie. You might consider adding a bit more sugar, since the cold will dull your sense of taste a bit (the same reason we put so much sugar in ice cream). Delicious. Just watch out for brain freeze.

Calligraphy by Lauren Saylor of A Fabulous Fete

Styling by Nole Garey for Oh So Beautiful Paper

Photos by Sweet Root Village for Oh So Beautiful Paper