Recipe: Carolina Mimosa

For this week’s ChampagneThursday recipe, I’d like to feature a drink recipe that I made up. And it’s awesome (if I do say so myself)!

The ingredients are champagne (extra dry–as dry as you can find for your budget; I used Andre Extra Dry because my budget was $5.00), Diet Cheerwine (I prefer to use diet, but I’m sure the regular version would be equally tasty), and orange juice (I use the Tropicana 50 with some pulp because this is the kind of OJ we generally keep on hand).

The proportions for this drink are easy. Fill your glass half way with champagne. Then, fill the remainder with half OJ and half Cheerwine. (1/4 OJ, 1/4 Cheerwine, 1/2 Champagne.) Voilà! The Carolina Mimosa!

For those who don’t know, Cheerwine is a soft drink indigenous to the Carolinas:

Cheerwine has a very sweet cherry flavor, is burgundy-colored, and has an unusually high degree of carbonation compared to other soft drinks. (from Wikipedia)

Another benefit of Cheerwine (especially Diet), is that it has a lot of caffeine–48.1 mg per can. If you’re not a morning coffee drinker, you get a lot of caffeine bang-for-your-buck when you grab one of these in the morning.

If you’re not up for the champagne, just do half OJ and half Cheerwine. This combination is really too awesome not to try!