Quick and easy Piña Colada

Yes, it’s January – full of cold and frosty mornings. But you don’t have to be trapped in your own personal bleak midwinter. Why not bring a bit of tropical sunshine into your life with a Piña Colada?

Making it is dead easy, as long as you’ve got the ingredients to hand. Just mix three parts of pineapple juice to one part of coconut cream. (We’re lucky in that one of our local shops does little 65ml packs of coconut cream, which goes perfectly with a 200ml carton of pineapple juice.) Add a good slosh of white rum and a moderate dash of sugar syrup, and serve on crushed ice.

(How you crush your ice is up to you. We’ve got a Hamilton Beach Blendmaster bar blender, so for each glass I sling in half-a-dozen ice cubes and give about a dozen pulses on the ice crusher button. In the past I’ve used a rolling pin on ice cubes wrapped in a tea towel, but it’s a bit hard on the tea towels.)

Ah yes, sugar syrup – a ridiculously simple thing to make, but an essential ingredient for many cocktails if you’re going to do them right. You can find a recipe for it here.