Cocktails & Canapes for Women's World Cup 2015: USA

I have been trying to match my cooking theme to a game that I am actually going to watch but as none of the games today kick off until 10pm UK time I will just have to miss out on them tonight. None the less I have chosen the USA as my theme for tonight's cocktail and canape. The USA are playing Nigeria who are struggling at the bottom of their group table.

I'll be drinking a Bronx cocktail:

 and nibbling mini bagels with cream cheese and smoked salmon:

The Bronx Cocktail consists of:
45 ml chilled gin
22 ml dry martini
22 ml sweet red/rosso martini
30 ml freshly squeezed orange juice

orange zest and maraschino cherry garnish

ice

Shake the gin, dry martini, sweet vermouth and orange juice over ice.
Pour into a chilled glass and garnish with a pick of orange zest and cherry

Serves 1

My bagel recipe is another of Dan Lepard's from his Short and Sweet book with online recipe available here: Simple Bagels. I followed the note in the recipe introduction and reduced the amount of yeast and left the dough overnight in the fridge. It may sound like a faff to have to first poach the bagels before baking, but do not let that put you off making them. The poaching is very simple and brief. The resulting bagels are far better than the run of the mill supermarket ones. I scaled my canape bagels at about 40g of dough so these are small bagels but still a tad large for a canape. I did about half mini and half normal size. I did not have any poppy or sesame seeds on hand so mine have just been sprinkled with a little extra sea salt.

 They are then just split and filled with a low fat cream cheese and a flavoursome smoked salmon.

Tomorrow we are opening the bubbly and cooking for France.