Poinsettia Champagne Cocktail

The Poinsettia is a delicious Champagne cocktail that features our favorite seasonal fruit, cranberries!

You’ve seen those bags of cranberries in the produce department, right? But what can you do with them other than make cranberry sauce? I’m sure there are tons of things you can do. I’ll let you Google that though because I want to tell you about just one. Cranberries in a Champagne cocktail.

Using Cranberries in Cocktails

Actually, cranberries look nice in any cocktail, or any drink for that matter. They float so prettily that I’ve even seen them floating in a vase of water just as  decoration.

Usually when cranberries are added to a cocktail in this way they’re kept whole and don’t really add flavor to the drink. How strange, right? I decided to try crushing up cranberries to see if that would work. Sadly, fresh cranberries don’t always crush well. You don’t get much juice out of them.

However, I discovered that freezing and then defrosting them seems to help. So stick your bag of cranberries in the freezer. Once frozen transfer to a bowl to defrost in the fridge. Then crush them up, add some liquid and then strain it (you need to strain it because there are small seeds in the cranberries). Add that to drinks for a nice tart cranberry flavor.

Or you could just buy cranberry juice 😉

Poinsettia Champagne Cocktail

To make the Poinsettia Champagne Cocktail, you get your defrosted cranberries and muddle them up with some orange liqueur. Strain it into a martini glass and then top it with cold sparkling wine. I like to add a few still-frozen cranberries at this point for garnish and to keep the drink cold.

Poinsettia Champagne Cocktail

Contributor: Christine Pittman

Learn how to make a delicious Champagne cocktail that features our favorite seasonal fruit, cranberries!

• Author: Christine Pittman
• Prep Time: 5 minutes
• Cook Time: 0 min
• Total Time: 5 minutes
• Yield: 1 serving 1x
• Category: Beverage
• Method: No-Cook
• Cuisine: American

Print Recipe

Ingredients

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• 10 frozen cranberries, defrosted (or ½ oz. cranberry juice)
• 1 oz. orange liqueur (like Cointreau, Grand Marnier or Triple Sec)
• ½ cup of dry sparkling wine
• 6–7 frozen cranberries

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Instructions

1. In a cocktail shaker combine the defrosted cranberries and orange liqueur. Muddle to mush up the cranberries. (Note: You can do this with a mortar and pestle if you don’t have a cocktail shaker and muddler).
2. Strain the orange liqueur through a fine mesh sieve into a martini glass.
3. Top the glass up with the sparkling wine. Garnish with the still-frozen cranberries.

This post originally appeared in December 2015 and was revised and republished in December 2020.