Alcoholic & Alcohol-Free! 2 Festive Mulled Drinks for Christmas

In today's video I'm going to show you how to make two beautiful festive drinks. One is the classic mulled wine and the other one is going to be a mulled cranberry juice, perfect for anyone that doesn't want to drink alcohol this Christmas. So here's everything you need for the mulled wine and for the mulled cranberry juice. So we'll begin by making our mulled wine. I've just got a bottle of red wine here. Get any red wine that you like to drink or that you're willing to spend the money on. Often you can use a cheaper bottle of wine because we're going to add some beautiful flavours anyway so you can almost enhance that cheaper bottle or you can get something that you really like to drink and then enhance that as well. So we've got our wine and next we're going to slice up one orange. So just cut it into nice slices and once you've done that you can take a Then we'll place it over a low heat and once it begins to just steam we'll add in some brown sugar but this is something you can adjust to your taste. I've started with 40 grams and then I'll taste it later on and decide whether it needs a little bit more sweetening or not. You could also use honey or maple syrup here in its place. Then we'll add in one teaspoon of vanilla bean paste or extract. This is optional, depends if you like vanilla or not. Followed by two cinnamon sticks, six cloves, two star anise, the sliced up orange and four slices of fresh ginger. We'll now leave that over the heat, a very low heat to cook for 10 to 15 minutes. That'll just help all those beautiful flavours infuse into the wine. Now we need to be careful it doesn't boil here. If it comes to a boil the alcohol will start to evaporate away and of course we want to keep as much alcohol in there as possible. So you want it just to be steaming but not boiling. After 10 to 15 minutes you can remove it from the heat. So that's our mulled wine now ready and all we need to do is leave it for another half an hour for those spices and fruit to infuse. So what we can do, we'll place a lid on and that'll just help keep all that steam in there and that flavour and the heat and just let it keep infusing for another half an hour. In the meantime we'll move on to making our mulled cranberry juice. Into a saucepan pour one litre of cranberry juice and then we're going to squeeze in the juice of one orange. We've also got a second orange here that we're just going to slice up. Place the cranberry juice over a low heat until just steaming and then add in 30 grams of light brown sugar. Remember you can always adjust the sweetness to your own personal taste. Next we'll add in one cinnamon stick, six cloves, three cardamom pods, just break them slightly to allow the flavour to come out, four slices of ginger, the sliced orange and the rind of one lemon. Now leave it to infuse over a gentle heat for 10 to 15 minutes and then you can remove it from the heat. And that's your mulled cranberry juice now ready and we'll do exactly the same as before we're just going to cover it but I don't have a lid for this pan so I'm just going to use some foil and then we'll leave that to sit to finish infusing for another half an hour. And that's your mulled wine and cranberry juice now ready to enjoy. It is optional but you can add a few fresh cranberries, orange and cinnamon for an extra little bit of garnish. So there you have it, there's my version of a mulled wine and also an alcohol-free mulled cranberry juice which is perfect to get the festive season started this year. I hope you enjoyed this recipe, consider subscribing if you haven't already and I'll see you in the next video.