Frangelico Amaretto Martini

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This Frangelico amaretto martini is delicious and lusciously flavoured with creamy hazelnut, almond, and hints of vanilla. It is so easy to make and so festive to make throughout the winter season. Serve it chilled in a beautifully decorated martini glass.

A Frangelico amaretto martini in a glass garnished with winter foliage and berries.

This cocktail is absolutely perfect for a Christmas or holiday gathering. Winter pear cocktail and blood orange negroni are some other delicious winter cocktails that you are sure to enjoy.

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Ingredients
Substitutions
Instructions
Equipment
Tip for Success
FAQ
📖 Recipe

Close up of a Frangelico amaretto martini.

Ingredients

Vanilla Vodka
Frangelico - A sweet and caramel-coloured Italian liqueur made from Italian hazelnuts combined with coffee, cocoa, and vanilla extracts. The flavour of this liqueur is quite delicious. The recipe is said to be based on that of monks' more than 300 years ago. Experts of distilling, these Italian monks infused liquor with wild hazelnuts. Frangelico is named after a hermit monk, Fra'Angelico, who lived in the Piedmont Hills in the 18th century.
Amaretto - Another sweet, Italian liqueur. This one originated in Saronno, in the Lombardy region. It can be made from almonds, bitter almonds, peach stones or apricots kernels. All of these are natural sources of benzaldehyde, which gives amaretto its distinctive almond flavour. The legends of its origin date this liquor back to the year 1525. I used Disaronno amaretto in this recipe.
Heavy cream
For rim: cinnamon and sugar

Substitutions

You can substitute vanilla vodka with regular vodka plus a very tiny drop of pure vanilla extract.

Instructions

Start by moistening the rim of a martini glass with agave syrup, lemon juice, or water.

Then dipped the glass into a shallow dish filled with a blend of ground cinnamon and granulated sugar.

Add the vanilla vodka, Frangelico, amaretto, and cream into a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake well, for about 20 seconds. This adds ice crystals into the martini and reduces the thickness of the cream.

Strain into a martini glass and serve.

Foliage glass decoration

To make this festive decoration for your martini glasses, you will need:

Tiny conifer branches - I used lemon cypress and the smell was incredible.
Berry foliage - I used cream hypericum berries, also known as St. John's wort.
Brown twine

Note: Add the cinnamon sugar rim first, so that the berries don't fall off when you invert the glass for dipping.

Arrange the branches how you would like them to sit around the glass, making sure to leave space so that you can easily sip without getting a mouthful of tree.

Take twine and wind it around, securing the branches to the glass stem.

Trim the berries off from their main stem, removing any leaves but keep a bit of stem. Press the berries into the conifer branches.

Overhead of a Frangelico amaretto martini.

Equipment

To make this Frangelico amaretto martini you will need:

Cocktail shaker
Japanese jigger
Cocktail strainer

All of these and many more useful bartending tools can be found inside this cocktail bar set.

cocktail bar set

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You will also need a martini glass to serve it in.

martini glass

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Tip for Success

Make sure to shake this martini vigorously for the full 20 seconds. Doing so causes the ice cubes inside to make tiny ice crystals inside the liquid, which gives a lovely consistency to the cocktail by diluting the cream, as well as making it icy cold.