Mix up a variation of the strawberry margarita

Posted to: Recipes

Basic Strawberry Margaritas
Makes about 46 ounces
-2 cups fresh Virginia strawberries, rinsed, hulled and halved
-6 ounces decent tequila (we used Jose Cuervo Especial)
-¼ cup frozen orange juice
-2 ounces triple sec or orange liqueur
-2 ounces frozen limeade
-4 ½ cups ice – or more or less to taste

Add the ice first, then the fruit and then the other ingredients. Process at high speed until smooth. Pour and serve with a sliced fresh strawberry for a garnish.

Variations:
-Strawberry-mint margarita Add ½ teaspoon mint extract and garnish with a fresh mint sprig. This is a very cooling margarita.
-Strawberry-lemon margarita Add ½ teaspoon lemon extract and garnish with a fresh lemon wheel. This margarita has a bright, fresh taste.
-Strawberry-coconut margarita Add ½ teaspoon coconut extract and garnish with a fresh round of unpeeled banana. The coconut gives it just a hint of the tropics.
-Strawberry-peach margarita Replace triple sec with an equal amount of peach schnapps. Rim the glass with sea salt and chipotle peppers that have been finely ground together in a blender. This is a complex sipper.

By Lorraine Eaton
The Virginian-Pilot
© May 6, 2009

It's strawberry season.

Make that strawberry margarita season.

To help you get your swirl on, we've developed a basic frozen strawberry margarita recipe that is easy to make and refreshing as is. But it's also the perfect canvas for creating your own signature spring cocktail.

After mixing up a batch of the basic recipe, we split it into fourths. Then we culled our collection of baking extracts and found out just how easy it is to make subtle - yet delightful - changes to the basic strawberry margarita flavor.

We added mango to one batch, just because we happened to have one on hand. That changed the flavor greatly but still yielded a nice, cooling drink.

A couple of notes:

Our recipe uses frozen limeade and frozen orange juice. If you leave the cans out to soften, measuring is much easier.

These drinks are not overly sweet, nor overly strong. If you prefer more of either taste, adjust the amounts after you've finished making the basic batch.

You can use simple syrup as a sweetener. It's simple to make - equal parts water and dissolved sugar, or try Poe's Phantastic Simple Syrup, a Virginia-made product available at ABC stores for $4.95 for a 1-liter bottle.

You can also add ice to adjust the texture. We like to serve margaritas so that you can stand a spoon in them.

Finally, these margaritas are nice with or without salt. We made one version with sea salt and ground chipotle peppers, an interesting flavor combination that delivered a hit of heat to the back of the throat on the finish.

So dust off those margarita glasses, plug in the blender, fire up your imagination and get to celebrating strawberry margarita season in style.

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