All wedding pictures in this post are by our very talented photographers, The Spragues. These photos cannot be used without their permission.

Almost a year later, I have finally managed to sit down and write about our wedding. It was largely a DIY affair, brought to life by many, many helping hands. We celebrated with a small group of 40 people – just immediate family and close friends – at my parents’ house in Maine, where Trevor and I have been going together since high school. Insanely, wonderfully, my parents built a barn on the hill above our house to host our reception. By hand. I know, we are incredibly spoiled. It took many weekends of labor to bring the boat barn to fruition, but in some ways building the barn was the part of the wedding I loved most of all. Working alongside both sets of parents to build a structure to house our friends and family felt purposeful and unifying. And walking up the hill that day to see the barn filled with our handmade oak farm tables, tables covered in copper vases and pink flowers, candles and string lights filling the whole space with warmth… it was so incredibly beautiful. I don’t really have a photo that adequately captures the magic of that space, but these come close.

I don’t remember the day in that much detail, but what sticks with me the strongest is our ceremony. Standing under the pine trees clinging to Trevor’s arm, my brother welcoming our friends, my mother standing at my side, and the teary-eyed faces of so many of the people that I love staring back at me, I felt a truly powerful surge of love and wonder. We spent the weeks leading up to the wedding writing our ceremony, which was difficult, but important: when we stood up there, we knew exactly what we were saying and why. My brother officiated, and standing in the basement in a bit of a panic moments before the ceremony, hearing my friends laugh as he stood up there joking with the crowd was truly what calmed me enough to get myself out the door.

And then, we were off. People stood in clusters on the lawn drinking white wine and playing lawn games, or sat on the dock watching the light change over the lake. As the sun started to set we were seated at the long farm tables and the toasts began, making me cry, for the first time that day. Then we ate, and laughed, and talked, and it felt exactly like the wonderful dinner party we were envisioning.

After dinner, the evening devolved, as we had hoped it would, into tequila shots and dancing barefoot on the lawn, friends sneaking off into the woods and out on the canoe, sitting around the campfire and eating s’mores. This is less a memory and more a blur of mental snapshots. Immediately after the wedding I felt devastated by the fact that I couldn’t remember each moment, but a year later, I’ll take the happy blur. Happy blur is what we were going for, after all.

As for the details, for those of you who get into this kind of thing: the ceremony benches were planks of white oak milled from trees on the property. The tables, too, were made by hand and painstakingly finished to showcase the beautiful wood. I did the flowers myself, with the help of my bridesmaids, using homegrown dahlias, garden roses, astilbe, eucalyptus and hypericum. Plus cosmos, Queen Anne’s lace, and leucothoe borrowed from a neighbor’s garden two days before the wedding when it turned out one of the flower companies I had ordered from was a scam. Those missing flowers were the only near disaster of the whole DIY affair, and the day was promptly saved by my incredible friend Veronika, who bought all the roses at Wholefoods before she left Boston, and several generous neighbors. Cosmos and Queen Anne’s lace have a special place in my garden now.

And, since this is a food blog, the menu: for the happy hour, ceviche, buttermilk fried chicken bites in a waffle cone, and sliders (at the bride’s insistence!) with blue cheese and candied bacon. Dinner was family style, and heaping platters of espresso-rubbed flank steak, lemon rosemary roasted chicken, sweet corn succotash, and smoked gouda mashed potatoes made their way up and down the length of each table. We skipped the cake and instead went for mini pumpkin cheesecakes, blueberry pies, and banoffee parfaits. Everything was incredible and our caterers, Bar Harbor Catering Company, did a truly fantastic job. Not only was the food delicious but the event planning and coordination that they provided was just really game changing. Last but far from least, The Spragues captured everything perfectly, while somehow managing to seamlessly  join our guests in the party.

Beyond these pictures and memories, I have one more thing to share with you: our signature cocktail recipe. We wanted something that was autumnal without being overly cozy, to suit that in-between season of mid-September in Maine. We ended up with the Liquid Ditty: bourbon, dry hard cider from Bantam, Calvados, and honey-sage syrup. (An aside, Trevor and I just engaged in a rigorous debate about what to name this cocktail. A search on “Golden Apple” led us down a Wikipedia rabbit hole through Greek mythology to recently discovered dwarf planets. “Apple of Discord” was deemed unfit for a wedding cocktail, and I couldn’t convince him that “Apple of Bliss-chord” was hilarious. We considered “The Spitz,” named after the Esopus Spitzenburg apple tree in our front yard., but ultimately, we’ve settled on the “Liquid Ditty.” It’s a reference to Poe’s poem “The Bells,” which Trevor strongly associates with our wedding day. Plus, it’s catchy. Alternate name suggestions still welcome.) Nearly a year later, I’ve mixed up another batch to drink on the porch with Trevor. It’s just as delicious as I remember it – crisp and appley with just a hint of sage. We’ll be drinking these all September.

The Liquid Ditty: Bourbon, Calvados, and Cider Cocktail

A crisp and refreshing cocktail for the season in between summer and fall. Hard cider, Bourbon, Calvados, and honey-sage syrup come together for a chilled autumnal sipper. We came up with this drink to celebrate our wedding and now it’s a September favorite.

A Katie at the Kitchen Door original recipe.

• Author: Katie at the Kitchen Door

Ingredients

For the honey-sage syrup:

• 1/2 cup water
• 1/2 cup honey
• 15 leaves fresh sage, roughly chopped

For each cocktail:

• 1 part Calvados
• 2 part Bourbon
• 1 part honey-sage syrup
• 1 part chilled hard dry cider, such as Bantam Wunderkind
• 1 sage leaf, for garnish
• ice

Instructions

For the honey-sage syrup:

Bring all ingredients to a simmer. Let simmer for 3-5 minutes, until sage is bright green and syrup is foamy. Remove from heat and let steep for 10 minutes.

For each cocktail:

Stir together Calvados, honey-sage syrup, and Bourbon to combine. Pour over ice in an old-fashioned glass. Top off with cider, garnish with a sage leaf, and serve.

The post Our Wedding // Liquid Ditty Cocktail appeared first on Katie at the Kitchen Door.

I like this time of year more and more as I get older. I’m not talking about the holiday season. That I’ve always loved, and actually the holidays seem to become a little more stressful and a little less joyful every year – but I’ll save that topic for another day. I’m talking about the time between the holidays, the normal, early winter days.

I typically approach winter with a feeling of dread. January and February are usually so HARD for me – it’s dark, the snow and the cold the past few years have been relentless, my skin gets so dry that I can’t sleep, and my emotions get all out of whack. Last year I tried to combat it with an end of January trip to the USVI, which helped a little, but February, and even March, to be honest, were brutal. Thankfully, we’ll be skipping a solid 6 weeks of that awful deep winter time this year – thanks to my job, it seems I’ve become a snowbird at a young age.

But December is a different story. I vividly remember walking home from work one night in mid-December last year – it was cold, but very bright. After I passed through the hubbub of Harvard Square, it suddenly felt deeply quiet, the kind of quiet that is rare in a city. The kind of quiet that I associate with being in the woods, with a soft blanket of snow reflecting the moon into the night. The moon was full, the trees, stripped of their leaves, left stark echos against the blue-black sky. And I realized, all at once, that I love that quiet, that stillness. It’s a stillness that only comes with true cold, with the earth settling into sleep. So there is a part of winter that I love, and it felt significant to me to recognize this, to embrace something I was dreading.

These past few weeks I’ve been experiencing the same thing – a feeling of calm on cold, moonlit evenings, and on brisk, crisply sunny mornings. Enjoying the quiet as I wait for the bus in the early morning light, watching my breath form puffy clouds in front of me. It’s a nice counterpoint to the chaotic joy of the holidays.

As you may recall, another reason I can get behind winter is warm cocktails. Over the years I’ve posted a number of my favorite recipes here, like this Burnt Sugar Hot Buttered Rum and this Nutella Melt. Last year I did a little round-up of all my favorite winter cocktails… which it seems I might have to update soon. My first contribution to that list for this season is this Mulled Spiked Cider with Port and Cranberries, which also has a little red wine, apples, and clementines. Like many of my favorite drinks, it’s inspired by Maria and Tara‘s genius book Winter Cocktails, which pretty much becomes a fixture in my kitchen at this time of year. This warm, sweet, boozy drink was the perfect thing to warm us up over the lazy long weekend… and the leftovers are just the thing to look forward to coming home to after a stressful weekday.

Mulled Spiked Cider with Port and Cranberries

Inspired by Winter Cocktails. Serves 4-6.

• 2 whole cinnamon stick
• 2 whole star anise
• 10 whole cloves
• 3 c. apple cider
• 2 clementines, scrubbed and cut into thin slices
• 1/2 c. fresh cranberries
• 1 apple, cored, peeled and cut into 1/4 inch cubes
• 1/4 c. white sugar
• 2 c. red wine
• 3/4 c. tawny port
• brandy or Bourbon to taste, optional

1. Add the cinnamon, star anise, and cloves to a large saucepan or dutch oven and toast over medium heat until fragrant, about 1 minute. Add the apple cider, clementines, cranberries, apple, and sugar and gently simmer until fruit is soft, about 10 minutes. Add the red wine and port and continue heating just until the drink begins to steam, then remove from the heat and cover to keep warm. Ladle into mugs to serve, removing any cloves that you see as you do so. Adding a splash of brandy or Bourbon to each if you like your drinks a little stronger!

The post Winter Stillness // Mulled Spiked Cider with Port and Cranberries appeared first on Katie at the Kitchen Door.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I hope that none of you have had any major kitchen or travel mishaps, and that you’re all getting ready/happily in the midst of/recovering from a relaxing day of family, friends, and delicious eating. We’re in the car on our way up to Maine to see Trevor’s family, but before we sit down to overindulge, I wanted to share our Thanksgiving submission to the Captain’s Table Challenge.

As I mentioned Monday, we’re part of a group of 15 bloggers that are teaming up with Captain Morgan to create delicious rum-based food and drink recipes for the holiday season. There’s a bit of a contest aspect to it as well, so I’m extra motivated to make these recipes top notch (there’s nothing like a little competition to get me going). For the Thanksgiving edition of the challenge, we decided to work with two classic November ingredients, sweet potatoes and cranberries, turning each into a rum-infused masterpiece. After a bit of group brainstorming at the wedding we were at last weekend, we decided that the only thing for the sweet potatoes was a souffle, and not just any souffle, but a light, fluffy, rum-scented souffle drizzled with a rum-raisin caramel sauce. There are a surprising number of sweet potato souffle recipes out there, but you’ll quickly notice that most of them are not actually souffles, but instead just mashed sweet potatoes buried under some form of sweet goo (I so enjoyed Sommer’s rant on this topic). What we were going for was a real souffle, with a classic roux-base, a bit of rum, and a hint of sweet potato flavor.

Creating our own recipe for souffles was a bit of a risky move, and it was a tense 30 minutes in the kitchen as we waited to take them out of the oven. We’ve made souffles before, but tweaking any baking recipe can be hit or miss, plus souffles are notoriously challenging and we did significantly more than tweak a base recipe. We did our research, though, and what came out of the oven was far more perfect than we expected – puffed up gracefully over the top of the ramekins, cooked through yet still creamy, light and sweet and everything you want a souffle to be. With the thick, syrupy-sweet rum raisin caramel drizzled on top, I am not ashamed to admit that we each had two of these, one after the other. And then we skipped dinner.

As for the cranberries, I knew I wanted to do a festive riff on Dark and Stormy’s, the classic ginger and dark rum cocktail that’s pretty much perfect any time of year. I wanted to incorporate cranberries, but I didn’t want the drink to be too sweet or cloying, so instead of using cranberry juice, I made a thick, almost jam-like cranberry-ginger syrup for the base of the drink. After reading an article in Bon Appetit about how we should be celebrating Thanksgiving with the new crop of artisanal hard ciders that wouldn’t have been out of place at early colonial celebrations, I decided to replace the traditional ginger beer with one of my favorite sparkling ciders, Bantam’s Wunderkind. The resulting drink was strong and slightly sweet, with hints of spice, cranberry and apple.

So, if you’re looking for something to do with your leftover mashed sweet potatoes or that bag of cranberries you didn’t end up using? Try a souffle, or a cranberry-ginger cocktail, or maybe even both. And let me know what you think! Also, if there’s any flavor combinations or recipe types you’d like to see for our Christmas Captain Morgan challenge, leave a note in the comments – we’re looking for inspiration anywhere we can get it. Have a wonderful holiday!

Disclaimer: This post is sponsored by Captain Morgan, who provided me with product samples and monetary compensation in exchange for my participation in this program. All opinions are honest and my own, as always.

Sweet Potato Souffles with Rum Raisin Sauce

Serves 5.

For the souffles:

• 2 medium sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into 1/2 inch cubes
• 2 TBS olive oil
• 3 TBS butter plus extra for greasing the ramekins
• 3 TBS flour
• 3/4 c. warm milk
• 1/4 c. Captain Morgan Original Spiced Rum
• 3 egg yolks
• 1/4 c. sugar plus extra for preparing the ramekins
• 6 egg whites
• pinch cream of tartar

1. Preheat the oven to 375F. Toss the sweet potato cubes with the olive oil and place in a single layer on a baking sheet. Bake for 30-40 minutes, until very tender and almost falling apart. Stir the sweet potatoes once after 20 minutes. While still warm, add the sweet potato cubes to a blender and puree until smooth. Scrape the puree out of the blender and set aside.
2. Adjust the oven temperature to 350F. Butter five 6-oz. souffle dishes or ramekins, then sprinkle a bit of sugar into each. Tap the sugar around the edges of the dish, tapping out any excess. Set the prepared dishes aside.
3. In a wide frying pan, melt the butter over medium heat. Whisk in the flour, and cook for 2-3 minutes, until the mixture is a pale yellow and smells nutty. Add 1/4 c. of the warm milk to the roux and whisk until smooth, then slowly whisk in the remaining warm milk. Cook over medium-low heat until thick and smooth, about 1-2 minutes, then remove from the heat. Whisk in the rum, and let cool slightly.
4. Beat the egg yolks and the sugar together until thick and pale yellow. Quickly whisk into the roux, taking care that the roux is not hot enough to scramble the eggs. Then, whisk in 3/4 c. of the sweet potato puree, adding 1/4 c. at a time. When the mixture is smooth and evenly colored, set aside.
5. In a large, clean bowl, beat the egg whites until frothy. Sprinkle the cream of tartar over the top, and then beat until the egg whites are shiny and hold a stiff peak. Fold the sweet potato mixture gently into the egg whites until they are just combined. Spoon the souffle mixture carefully into the prepared dishes, filling them just shy of the brim. Place the ramekins in a larger baking dish, and fill the baking dish with hot water so that it reaches halfway up the sides of the souffle dishes. Bake for 25-30 minutes, until souffles are puffed up and set in the middle. Remove and serve immediately with the warm rum raisin sauce.

For the sauce:

• 1/2 c. Captain Morgan Black Spiced Rum
• 1/2 c. raisins
• 1/2 c. sugar
• 1/2 c. cream

1. Place the rum and the raisins in a small saucepan. Heat over low heat until the rum just begins to steam, then immediately remove from heat and set aside. Let sit for at least 10 minutes to allow the raisins to plump up.
2. Pour the sugar into the bottom of a heavy-bottomed saucepan in an even layer. Place over medium heat, and melt sugar, whisking frequently. As you whisk, the sugar will clump up, but once melted, all the clumps should dissolve. As soon as all the sugar is melted, stop whisking but swirl slightly. Watch the sugar closely as it begins to darken. As soon as it reaches a golden caramel color, add the heavy cream all at once. Be careful, the caramel will bubble violently when you do this. Whisk until the mixture is even. Now add the rum and raisins all at once, again, being careful to avoid the bubbling up, and whisking until the mixture is even. As soon as the mixture is smooth and consistent. Remove from the heat and let cool slightly. Sauce should be served warm.

Cranberry-Ginger Sparkling Rum Cider

Serves 4.

• 3/4 c. sugar
• 3/4 c. water
• 1 1/2 c. fresh cranberries, rinsed (remove any squished/deflated berries)
• 1-inch piece of ginger, peeled and sliced thinly
• 6 oz. Captain Morgan Black Spiced rum
• ice cubes
• 2 c. sparkling cider (alcoholic)
• sugared cranberries, for garnish

1. Add the sugar and water to a medium saucepan and place over medium heat. Stir until the sugar dissolves, then add the cranberries and ginger. Simmer the mixture until thick and syrupy, about 15 minutes. Stir occasionally to prevent the cranberries from foaming up, pressing the cranberries against the side of the pan to pop them.
2. Pour the cranberry mixture through a fine-mesh sieve and strain the liquid into a medium bowl. Press gently on the cranberries to extract more juice, but be warned that if you press too hard you may end up with more of a jelly than a syrup (still delicious!). Refrigerate the syrup until cold; save the berries for another use.
3. Add 1 to 2 TBS of the cranberry syrup to each of 4 glasses, then add 1 1/2 oz. (1 shot) of rum to each glass. Stir vigorously to mix. Add a few ice cubes to each glass, then top off with 1/2 c. of sparkling cider. Garnish with sugared cranberries and serve immediately.

The post Captain’s Table Thanksgiving // Sweet Potato Souffles with Rum Raisin Sauce + Cranberry-Ginger Sparkling Rum Cider appeared first on Katie at the Kitchen Door.