Winnie the Pooh's Honey Lemonade

I love Lemonade.  It's probably my favorite drink in the entire world, despite its simplicity.  Water, lemons, sugar, all in different proportions according to your taste.  For years, I'd look up different recipes of those proportions, always trying to find my perfect balance between sweet and tart, with both complementing each other.  I didn't like recipes where the sweet sugar taste overpowered the tartness of the lemon, and I didn't like when it seemed to just be lemon and water mixed together.  There needed to be a perfect balance, a harmony of both extremes.

Then, one fateful morning, it happened.  I found the perfect balance, the right amounts of every ingredient that allowed me to have the most satisfying glass of lemonade ever in my life.  And all it took was a little honey.

My cousin grows lemons in her backyard, and usually in the morning, she'll squeeze a few to make lemonade.  I was telling her about how I kept experimenting with different proportions, but could never find a lemonade recipe that truly appealed to me.  She told me to try substituting honey instead of sugar.  At the time, I had never heard of such a thing.  And it was such a revelation that I was over the moon when I tasted it.  I mean.  Oh.  My.  Goodness.  It was that good.  Water, Lemon, and Honey.  So simple, but so earth-shatteringly mind-blowingly amazing.  How has that recipe eluded me for years?

It's a quick recipe.  Simply combine all three ingredients, stir or shake (I prefer stirring, sorry Mr. Bond!), and refrigerate.  The proportions I give at the end are my personal preferences, and sometimes I'll add a pinch of sugar as well.  It's a very versatile recipe, so I suggest experimenting to what works best for you.  But, how do you make it even better?

Auntie Ann's Pretzels offers Lemonade Mixers, which is a fancy way of saying "We'll add some fruit-flavored syrup to your lemonade and charge extra for it!"  Granted, the flavors are worth the extra price, and I love getting a cherry lemonade if I ever stop by an Auntie Ann's.  So I thought, this afternoon, how could I replicate a cherry lemonade without having to go to Auntie Ann's?  

And it dawned on me.  Rita's Water Ice.  Their cherry water ice is to die for, and I figured if it tastes great on its own, it surely would taste even greater when mixed with lemonade.  But I didn't want to just stir in some water ice with the lemonade.  That would be too boring.  Instead, I decided I'd re-freeze the water ice.

I bought a quart of the Cherry water ice, partly so that I'd have enough for an ice tray and partly so that I could have leftover to eat on days when I didn't want to go to Rita's.  Since the water ice is already in that slushy stage, it wasn't too hard to scoop it out and put them into the ice tray.  Unfortunately, it meant that they'd look kinda lumpy on top, but I didn't mind.  It's not an aesthetic quality I was aiming for.

I didn't do a whole tray, in case this experiment would be a failure, so I only scooped eight cubes.  As soon as I put them in the freezer, I began making my lemonade.  Four lemons got me one cup of lemon juice, but after straining several times, that one cup turned into 3/4, as 1/4 was pulp.  Normally, I'd leave the pulp in, but since I wanted to be able to include the cherry water ice cubes, it seemed best for the pulp to go.

I then poured the lemon juice into my water pitcher, and then added the half-cup of honey.  Some recipes call for all this to be done with hot water in order for the honey to fully dissolve.  While I do like that effect, I also like still being able to distinguish between honey and lemon when sipping my drink.  I stirred all three together, and the honey helped give the lemonade a very rich color than the normal water-lemon-sugar version.  

I then checked on my cherry water ice cubes.  They still weren't fully frozen, but they were solid enough, and so I attempted to scoop one out.  That ended badly, as it completely fell apart.  I was hoping that they would be solid enough that when it dropped into the lemonade, there would be a more colorful juxtaposition between the lemon and the ice.  Alas, as of this writing, the cubes are not yet solid.

Still, I wanted to see how a cherry lemonade would taste with Rita's, so I simply took a small spoonful and stirred it in a smaller glass of lemonade.  Incidentally, this was what I considered too boring before, and yet it turned out to be the only option I could do!

Not only did it taste amazing, but the vivid redness of the cherry water ice reminded me of Pooh's red shirt.  In addition, the use of honey instead of sugar also helped tie very much to the silly ole bear.  Thus, Winnie the Pooh's Honey Lemonade was born.

Winnie the Pooh's Honey Lemonade

5 1/2 cups water

3/4 cup lemon juice

1/2 cup honey

A spoonful of Cherry Water Ice (I used Rita's)

Directions:

Stir-n-shake-n-refrigerate!  Enjoy!

- Sonic