The Easy And Elegant 2-Ingredient Cocktail Ina Garten Serves At Celebrations Year-Round

When you host a party or celebration, there's an enormous amount of elements to cover, like cleaning, shopping, menu planning, music, and seating. Finding easier solutions to any one of these is always a welcome help. Leave it to Ina Garten to create a delicious, festive, and elegant cocktail option that requires no stirring or shaking, and is made with just two ingredients. Raspberry royales require a teaspoon of raspberry liqueur (also called framboise) and sparkling wine. These are simple enough to assemble right as your guests arrive and can be refilled quickly all through your event. Simply pour the liqueur into your glasses and top with a dry sparkling wine like champagne, prosecco, or cava.

Garten suggests that you can also add a couple of fresh raspberries to the drinks. You can skewer them on a decorative pick or just drop them in the bottom of each glass. That being said, if you want to keep the drinks cold without diluting the sparkling wine, freeze your raspberries ahead of time and drop them into each glass as you serve 'em. To keep raspberries from freezing solid together in a clump, freeze them like you would peach slices; place the berries on a flat tray with space in between each berry and freeze. You can then store them all in a freezer bag or container. Raspberry royales are appropriate for birthday parties, Christmas get-togethers, Thanksgiving appetizers, Oscar parties, or any other soirée you might host.

Many cocktail fans, and certainly champagne aficionados, are familiar with kir royales, and while they may taste similar to Ina Garten's raspberry royale, the ingredients differ. Kir royales are made with sparkling wine and crème de cassis, which is a black currant liqueur. There is a variation called kir imperial that mimics Garten's perfect party drink even more because the liqueur used is black raspberry. These sweet and tart little summer gems are more elusive than red raspberries and, contrary to how they look, are not the same as blackberries. The premium liqueur brand often selected for making kir imperials is Chambord from France.

Garten has admitted that raspberry royales are just one of three favorite sparkling wine-based cocktails she serves during the holidays. She also loves the brunch favorite, mimosas, which were popularized by legendary filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock. Finally, she adores kirs, though she makes hers with crème de cassis and sparkling wine. In reality, this is a kir royale. Kirs are traditionally made with cassis and white wine.