An Easy Homemade Gift

We have a couple good friends that make their own Irish cream every year. They were gracious enough to gift us with a bottle, in a great Blanton’s Bourbon bottle, at our wine party. My wife loves the stuff, and the way our friends make it, it’s a mild, tasty version that won’t knock you on your butt!

We have some good flip-top bottles from various drinks we’ve had (mostly some flavor of French lemonade or something like that). We thought it might be a good thing to make some Irish cream to give away. I hope our friends either 1. aren’t reading this, or 2. aren’t offended that we usurped their idea! If it weren’t so good, we wouldn’t have thought it was such a great idea, though.

The recipe we found couldn’t have been much easier:

• 1 cup cream (we used heavy, though light or even half and half might work for a thinner consistency)
• 1 14 ounce can of sweetened condensed milk
• 2 tablespoons of chocolate syrup (we used Ghirardelli, which seemed richer then Hershey’s)
• 1 tablespoon vanilla
• 1 tablespoon instant coffee (I’m going to use cold pressed coffee instead next time, and add more)
• 1 2/3 cup Irish whiskey (I’m also going to try a decent blend of Scotch whisky for Scotch cream)

The directions from there couldn’t be much easier:

Everything goes into a blender. The blender gets turned on high for 30 seconds. And it’s done!

The concoction should last for a couple months in the refrigerator. We poured it into the flip-top bottles, and I’m making labels for them. They’ll go out as gifts, and I hope those that get it really enjoy!

If you make stuff like this for gifts, let me know what you do…

Update…

I tried this with Ballentine Scotch whisky, a cheap but approachable blended whisky, and it worked as well as Irish whiskey.  So now we will be making… McAdams Scotch Cream!