Mixer's club July 2020

JULY THEME: Minimalism with a Message

here we have 3 ingredients, each impactful to a mix in their own right.

FLV Guanabana comes damn close to being a one shot on its own

FLV Sweet Coconut is here to really lean into the coconut vibe buried in Guanabana and push the idea of tropical

INW Pitaya bends nearly everything it touches to its will. It is a wholly distinct flavor that almost cannot be ignored once it finds its way into a mix.

Combining these 3 it is my hope that guanabana and pitaya are battling it out for supremacy on the palate while the coconut acts as a base upon which the battle can be waged. The premise is simple, the mix is simple, the flavor is (hopefully) complex.

Some might say that Die Hard is a Christmas movie, others refuse to acknowledge that. What I believe to be indisputable however, is that Die Hard’s antagonist Hans Gruber planned nearly every detail of his heist perfectly. What detail did Gruber fail to account for? Lunch.

When you’re hungry, you’re distracted, and when you’re distracted you make mistakes. Gruber was no exception. Underestimating John McClane might be something we all chalked up to hubris. Then again, it could just as easily have been that Gruber was trying to expedite things as his stomach protested the long day at Nakatomi Plaza. Gruber needed to pack himself a lunch, and what is the single most American lunch he could have packed to further solidify his claim that he was a hostage and not, in fact, the leader of the criminals who had stormed the plaza? Peanut butter and jelly. That’s right. I submit that the key to preventing the Die Hard franchise from making it past the first installment was little more than a quaint sandwich that could have helped sell Gruber’s claim that he was an american, and further prevented him from making non-trivial mistakes that cost him his escape in the end. This… is that sandwich.

So lets break down the actual recipe, yeah?

Okay, so there are 3 things I was absolutely certain of going into this one: PB DX, Concord Grape w/ Stevia, and INW Grape(s) would be core to success here.

Jam:
I was absolutely certain from the minute that I tasted CAP Concord Grape that the Concord grape and Grape(s) would be enough to sell grape jam authentically. A light touch of FW Sweetener really helps push the sugary sweet jam aspect and separate it from the other two elements.

Peanut Butter:
TFA's Peanut Butter DX is still, in my opinion, the gold standard for Peanut Butter flavors, and in this case it needed a little help from FW Hazelnut to help it remain present, and FLV Beer nuts to add a touch of salt and to help it stand up separately from the jam and bread.

Bread:
Plain ass white bread, this should be simple, right? This was honestly where I struggled more than anything else. I came to the conclusion that WF Croissant would be too dry and flakey on its own, a little too authentic to an actual croissant. So I needed to make it a little chewier, a little gummy. FLV Starch base brings the croissant back down from its high horse and turns it into a much more authentic bread rather than pastry.

I'm calling for a 7 day steep, but I can't say I feel it needs the extra time, if you're impatient it's good right off the shake but it should fully come into its own in the course of a week.

Mixer's Club Oct/Nov 2020 Find an old recipe and update it

I took my own Blue Eyes White Dragon and took some two and a half years of mixing knowledge, and access to some 500+ more flavors than I had when I created the original and decided that there were exactly 2 aspects that could not be removed. INW Pitaya and WS-23. I didn't touch the Pitaya, 1.5% is perfect to give it all the pitaya weirdness without it taking over the entire recipe by force. I did reduce the cooling by 1/2 though, in part because I acknowledge others will be trying this and not everyone wants their "cold" to be bracing and in part because I didn't want to bury any of the flavors that I used.

With that in mind, I chose to stay with the inherent weirdness of the original when swapping things around. That made Hangsen blueberry the natural choice, ironically for its utterly unnatural "electric" blueberry flavor. That is paired with the fairly recently released FA Blueberry Juicy Ripe which is, by all accounts, fantastic. In this case I feel like it sorta tamps down the inherent weirdness of Hangsen's offering, but that's not, strictly, a bad thing.

The peaches I went with here are JF Honey peach, because it's fucking brilliant, and CAP juicy peach because it is nominally very similar to TFA peach juicy, but more importantly because it's all sorts of fakey peach rings without much body.

A simple premise, perhaps nominally more grandiose than it should be, but I feel like this is a respectable "re-imagining" of the original.

Took the base from DAAPled pears, swapped the fruit around to dark berries. @UnappreciatedRobot has asked me to make this public, so... here it is.

Mixers club: March 2020. The ice cream man @eyemakepizza is about to be a father. To toast this, I've mixed a blue "milk".

What fun would it be if we made a straight forward blueberry cream? It has to be more than that. So I chose to go for a less common fruit (the pun didn't hurt). But then I was stuck, do I really want to just have a milk or cream base under this gooey boysenberry? Absolutely not. So while staying in the spirit of milk I choose to do a horchata.

The recipe is pretty straightforward,

FLV boysenberry is delicious and pairing it with PUR boysenberry preserves helps push it a little sweeter, and give it a little more if the syrupy feel I wanted.

The horchata is a balancing act
FLV horchata bring a nice layer of both the cinnamon and rice flavors, but I felt that reinforcing it a bit with the rich cinnamon to stand up to the boysenberries and the rice base to help mitigate fading was prudent. TFA's Bavarian cream was chosen for the relatively neutral vanilla and just a little bit of DAAP-y creaminess.

Special shout out to @rainbowdragon for helping with the art(okay, that's selling her efforts short, she did all the work) in this month's series of MC recipes

Mixers club: March 2020. The ice cream man @eyemakepizza is about to be a father. To toast this, I've mixed a pink "milk".

Pink here is a true amalgamation of flavors. INW cherry and INW shisha strawberry are both syrupy by nature, and the FA red touch is helping reinforce the strawberry to stand up along side the cherry. Pushing past that CAP sweet guava helps crank this otherwise pedestrian fruit combo into an oddly tasty medley of red fruits.

Pudding in this case is pretty cut and dry with FLV vanilla pudding and INW custard sharing the duties while FLV smooth vanilla helps cut through the fruit with a sweet soft vanilla.

Special shout out to @rainbowdragon for helping with the art(okay, that's selling her efforts short, she did all the work) in this month's series of MC recipes.

Mixers club: March 2020. The ice cream man @eyemakepizza is about to be a father. To toast this, I've mixed a green "milk".

It's a monster alright? Neither a blue or a pink recipe. The pun wrote itself (okay, that's a lie. @nowar wrote it), and the cream base is ripped right out of DAAPled pears.

TFA honeydew is delightful if a bit pervasive, it's almost hard to keep this fruit down to a manageable level to let anything else shine through.

TFA key lime is basically candy lime, green jello type flavor. Distinctly green but different enough that it sweetens the mix and stands outside of the shadow of the honeydew.

FA Aurora is sharp, like lime zest sharp. In this instance something that can really make itself known and fight that bully honeydew to a stalemate was necessary. It was important for the sake of contrast to find something that would stand side by side with the honeydew without clashing.

Special shout out to @rainbowdragon for helping with the art(okay, that's selling her efforts short, she did all the work) in this month's series of MC recipes

I wanted to capture as much of a peaceful morning as I could in one go. Coffee, some sweet tobacco, something just a little nutty, and enough maple to really hammer home the morning time nature of the whole endeavor.

VT Caffe Latte is impressively functional for coffee to start, and doesn't need a whole lot of help there. It doesn't read as though there's as much milk here as a Latte would imply, but that's perfectly alright in this instance.

FLV Tatanka and FLV Red Burley are an unreasonably complementary pairing in my opinion. The sort of well rounded tobacco base you can build in a lot of different directions. it's a little sweet and has enough body to it that it doesn't get buried in everything else going on here.

TFA Pralines and Cream is adding some nuttiness, some body, and a little more sweetness

TFA Maple syrup is the icing on the cake here to me. It is just the concentrated flavor of the major brand "maple flavored syrup"s, the little bit here goes a long way to make sure this mix doesn't get mired in the coffee and tobacco's lack of sweetness and adds just enough maple to come through and make things a little more interesting.

This sort of came together as a bit of blind experimentation.

I've been on an unapologetic tobacco kick for a bit now, and I've really been riding Tatanka as an anchor point for myself with those mixes. It's sorta sweet and plays well with others, which had made it extremely forgiving to tie it into recipes.

Red Burley is just such a mutable base that it felt like the "right" place to go to tie in with the tatanka tobacco in an agreeable way.

Connecticut shade is an odd duck to me, there's a ton of depth there, but every time I use it, I feel like I've gotta take a leap of faith with it because the smell totally hides how tasty it can be when used to accent a mix.

With that, the horchata was chosen to help add the cinnamon spice notes and a touch of body in tandem with the magic that is sweet coconut, which was chosen for both the flavor and the density of it. I wanted a bit of weight to the mix along with that sweet coconut flavor.

Finally FLV smooth vanilla acts as something of a bridge between the tobaccos and the coconut-horchata mixture.

Pretty simple premise.

@ID10-T charged us with making a recipe that recalls a memory of a past Autumn. I have been working in kitchens for most of my life, and I love to play around with food. Last Autumn I made a bread pudding for work that included a whiskey flambeed green apple compote. I loved this dessert when I made it, and may yet make it again ahead of Thanksgiving.

Anyhow, this is my attempt at recreating this in an eliquid.

FE french toast and FA zeppola make up the bulk of the "bread" in my bread pudding. Conveniently the French toast brings along some extra spices, sweetness, and eggs.

FLV eggnog is helping in two ways, it is broadening the custard, but it is more importantly doubling down on the spices needed to sell the Autumnal bread pudding.

INW custard has one job here, and it's really straight forward, make sure the body of the custard is rich enough to stand up to the bread, apples, and whiskey.

FW hazelnut is just helping normalize the bready notes

PUR country apple is cooked apples, and absolutely necessary here. It has the sweetness you'd look for along with the "cooked" apples rather than something like FA Fuji which tastes much more "raw".

TFA Kentucky bourbon carries the flavor I want and doesn't have the bite you'd get from FLV bourbon, which is perfect for this application. Cooking with booze, especially flambeed the flavor remains but none of the alcoholic bite.

I've only had time to give this a shake and vape test, so I'm gambling a bit here but if this stays close to the shake and vape flavor without falling apart it should be a nice easy Autumn vape.