My first encounter with a clone recipe was in college. I was a freshman, and as is the case with most first-year college students, I had very little money. This was an unfortunate situation for many reasons, but especially because living right down the hall of my dormitory was a group of girls who really loved drinking Kahlua, and they really loved boys who gave them bottles of it. To show their devotion to the expensive coffee liqueur they would peel the fabric seal off the neck of each bottle they finished and proudly tape it to the outside of their dorm room door. By Christmas their door was about half-covered with the little booze trophies and the throw rug in their room smelled like Black Russians.
One day my buddy turned me onto a fifth-generation photocopy of a recipe someone had given him. It listed 5 ingredients – vodka, sugar, water, instant coffee, and vanilla – that when cooked together under the right conditions would produce a liqueur that tasted exactly like Kahlua. This was too good to be true! We immediately got to a kitchen and converted the cheapest vodka we could find into the party girls’ beverage of choice, loaded it into empty Kahlua bottles, and anxiously awaited the weekend. When we presented our female friends with a couple bottles of “special Kahlua” the party was on. And they loved it! The liqueur tasted exactly like Kahlua, but what we didn’t realize was that the proof was close to double what’s in the real stuff! You can imagine the shenanigans that ensued when everyone downed the usual number of drinks but with twice the alcohol content they were used to. It’s no wonder nobody noticed when we took the empty bottles home with us at the end of the night to refill again for the following weekend.
(Excerpted from Top Secret Restaurant Recipes 3, to be released on 9/28/2010)
Popular Posts