! Welcome to my strange world !: October 2010

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Sunday, October 17, 2010

Skittle Vodka Tutorial - I'm going to be making this next weekend!

Infusing vodka with Skittles is a very popular trend right now. There are a couple of different ways to do it. My way involves separating all the Skittles into their separate flavors and making five different bottles of Skittles vodka.
final

For this project, you’ll need:
ingredients

One 1.75 liter bottle of vodka (I used Stoli – you don’t need the most expensive vodka, but do avoid the cheap ones)
Five 8.5 ounce flasks or bottles (I got mine from The Container Store. Also check out these from Amazon. For a Halloween party, serve these neon-colored concoctions in spooky lab flasks or potion bottles.)
One 1 pound bag of Skittles
Five empty plastic water bottles
A funnel
Bowls for separating the Skittles into flavors
A measuring cup (not pictured)
Coffee filters or paper towels

You’ll also want to cover your workspace with newspaper or freezer paper – this infusion can get messy. If you’re making a different sized batch, here’s the formula you need to know: I used 60 Skittles to 6 ounces of vodka, which yields about 8 ounces of infused vodka. If you want to make 1.5 times that, or 3 times that, just multiply your amounts.

Step 1: Separate Skittles into Flavors

Start by simply separating the Skittles into flavors. You want 60 of each.

Step 2: Setting up your Infusion Bottles

Fill your water bottles with 6 ounces of vodka each. It doesn’t need to be exact – you can always even it out later by pouring in a bit more vodka to the ones that come out with less.
waterbottles-300x161

Step 3: Add the Skittles

Pour the Skittles of one flavor into one infusion bottle, then pour the next flavor of Skittles into the next infusion bottle, and so on until all five bottles have a pile of Skittles soaking in the vodka.

You could certainly be more sophisticated than I was here, and use a funnel to pour the Skittles of each flavor into one of the bottles. The reason I did it this way was that I felt it would be easier to wash each flavor of Skittles off my hands before moving onto the next one than it than to get that flavor out of the funnel each time – that plastic tends to hold onto the flavors, skin doesn’t.

Step 4: Shake ‘em, shake ‘em, shake ‘em

Now your infusion bottles all have Skittles in the bottom. Give each bottle a good shake – the more, the better. In my picture here, you can see that the colored candy coating has already rubbed off into the vodka, but the white insides of the Skittles still have a lot of dissolving to do. After shaking them, set them aside for a few hours. It’s a good idea to shake them again then, especially if you’re making a bigger batch. My Skittles all dissolved overnight.
Once they’re all dissolved, you’ll notice a lot of white muck floating at the top. We’ll take care of this in Step 6.
infusion

Step 5: Strain

There are a number of ways to strain this stuff and get all the white gunk out. Some people prefer paper towels, but I used coffee filters and found they worked just as well. I put a funnel inside a measuring cup.
coffeefilters

Then I put four coffee filters in the funnel. It’s hard to say exactly how many you’ll need, since not all coffee filters are exactly the same. I’ll tell you one thing I did learn, though: orange and green needed more filtration than the others. I discovered this when I thought I was finished, and found a little bit of white stuff still floating in those two flavors. No problem, though: I just strained them again through one more coffee filter, and that took care of it. So if you find you haven’t strained it thoroughly enough, the good news is: you can always fix that later.
pouring

Then I poured one of the infusions into my strainer setup. I had to pour about a quarter of my infusion in, then wait for some of it to soak through, then pour another quarter in, until I was done. (If the strainer clogs with white gunk, use a spoon to scrape the white gunk out of the way.) In the end, you’ll have about 8 ounces of Skittle infused vodka. Then I dumped the funnel and coffee filters into one of the bowls I’d used earlier for counting out Skittles, to catch drips as I carried it over to the sink. I washed everything out for re-using (except the coffee filters, of course – those I just rinsed before disposing of, so the sugar wouldn’t attract ants).
intobottle

Then I took the liquid from the measuring cup and poured it into a flask, via the now-clean funnel. You can see here that the green is a little thick, and it shouldn’t have been – that’s why I ended up having to re-filter it. Then I rinsed the funnel out again.
Repeat this process for each flavor.
Here you can see about how much gunk the filtration takes out:
gunk

Step 6: Chill and Serve

Now you’ve got 5 flasks or bottles of Skittles infused vodka:
flasks

Stick them in the freezer for several hours – overnight is fabulous…
freezer

…and they’re ready to serve:
chilled

Now, these are pretty strong on their own – nearly pure vodka. They are also very sweet. You can drink them straight, served up in a chilled martini glass, or you can use them in a cocktail:

Mix them with ginger ale, 7-up or Sprite to taste
Mix them with cola to taste (diet cola cuts the sweetness a little)
Serve them on the rocks to water it down a little
Some people mix them with fruit juice. I didn’t try this, because to me the Skittles were plenty of sweetness for my taste buds.
Everyone’s taste varies – there are so many directions you can take this drink in, you really should try anything that sounds good to you!

Cheers!

source

Saturday, October 16, 2010

The recurring prop newspaper

If you watch enough television shows and movies, then you might even start to notice that a bunch of the same props are used over and over again. I first noticed this with a magazine prop in various television shows including Married With Children, which featured a gum advertisement on the back cover. Someone on Reddit recently put together a compilation of photos from various television shows, commercials and movies, showing how one newspaper prop gets around and is reused, and reused again.
I don’t know the story behind this prop newspaper, but I assume it was created as a royalty free prop for television shows. Somewhere along the line, the prop became a recurring gag between propmasters. Something like how sound designers reuse the Wilhem Scream in every movie. Check out some examples after the jump.