Italian Soda (Non-Alcoholic)

A drink like this sounds unnecessary if you have a SodaStream. Good for you if you do.

Now we will make this syrup and a drink from scratch.

The New York Bartender's Guide says you can buy any Italian syrup and combine it to make a soda drink of your choice. I had cherry juice, so I cooked down two cups of it with the juice of one lime and added sugar until it thickened and sweetened to my taste. You can do this with any fruit juice.

You can make vanilla soda the same way with extract and sugar water. The possibilities are pretty endless. Take your flavor and add it to sugar to make a syrup.

• 1 oz. Italian syrup of your choice
• seltzer 
• lemon or lime slice (optional)

Build drink in a highball glass full of ice and top with soda. Stir gently and garnish. 

Mocha Slush (Non-Alcoholic)

Oh, my! This yummy mocktail, similar to a Mudslide, reminds me of the coffee slushies that I enjoyed as a high school student, back before I learned to drink coffee hot and black. To make this, I made my own coffee syrup--chocolate syrup is easily purchased at the grocery store. The coffee syrup is made from hot black coffee and hot simple syrup. Simply mix a cup of hot coffee with 1/2 cup of sugar in a saucepan and heat on low while stirring.

If you want to make this drink alcoholic, feel free to add vodka or light rum in the blender.

• 2 oz. coffee syrup (homemade syrup used)
• 1 oz. chocolate syrup
• 4 oz. milk
• chocolate shavings

Combine all ingredients except chocolate shavings in a blender with ice. Blend until slushy and pour into a wine goblet. Sprinkle chocolate shavings on top. 

Exit 13-E (Non-Alcoholic)

A little research shows that just about every major U.S. highway has an Exit 13-E. The most notable might be New York's I-95 exit, for some reason. Everything is more important if it is in New York, if you haven't noticed. A little more research reveals that loganberry juice is almost never used in cocktails, this being the one exception! How rare that it is a mocktail as well.

So loganberries are a wild breed that is crossed between blackberries and raspberries. They are much more like blackberries in taste, but they have a red color. Good luck finding them, they aren't really harvested like other berries of this kind. So I had to get creative.

I juiced a pint of blackberries and added a previously-made blackberry syrup. This used all the juice from the blackberries just to make this one drink (something like $5 dollars worth of berries). I used the juice with no added sugar, which was a great move. Had this deep black color, but when mixed with pineapple juice it got this luster that I could barely capture with my camera. It was really beautiful and drinking it was the experience of drinking a quart of blackberries.

• 4 oz. loganberry juice (blackberry and raspberry juice substituted)
• 4 pineapple juice
• 1/2 oz. lime juice

Combine all juices in a Collins glass full of ice and stir. 

Cherry Cherry (Non-Alcoholic)

Unsweetened cherry cider is the trick to the Cherry Cherry, a very tart treat of a mocktail that looks like some kind of Sea Breeze. It's tasty! And this virgin drink may be one of the best recipes I've made involving unsweetened cherry juice.

• 4 oz. unsweetened cherry cider
• 1 oz. lime juice
• sparkling water
• lemon slice

Pour cherry cider, and lime juice in an Old Fashioned glass full of ice and stir. Top with sparkling water and garnish with the lemon slice. 

Sparkling Peach Melba (Non-Alcoholic)

This is a top-notch mocktail! It calls for pureed raspberries with the seeds strained out. But if you have a shaker with a built-in strainer, just add fresh raspberries to the shaker with, of course, peach nectar, and shake pretty hard to break up the berries. Strain through fine mesh, and you should have a nice pink raspberry and peach juice blend. Pour it directly into the glass over ice.

• 4 oz. peach nectar
• 1/4 cup fresh raspberries
• sparkling water

Shake raspberries and peach nectar in a shaker with ice. Double strain into a Collins glass full of fresh ice. Top with soda and stir. Recommended garnish: one peach slice. 

Under The Boardwalk (Non-Alcoholic)

Wow! What a delightful beach drink that is delicious and non-alcoholic! Makes me think of a beach fruit smoothie tent at Atlantic City. If you have a blender and plenty of fresh fruit, you can make this drink during summer months when peaches are in season.

• 2 oz. lemon juice
• 1/2 tsp. sugar
• 1/2 peach pealed and diced
• fresh raspberries
• sparkling water

Combine all ingredients except sparkling water and raspberries in a blender with ice. Blend until smooth and pour into a chilled Collins glass (or Hurricane glass as pictured). Top with sparkling water and stir. Garnish with raspberries.

Peach Fuzz (Non-Alcoholic)

This is one of the more complicated non-alcoholic, "Smoothie," style drinks to make. And I can't help but think that it is flawed in some way. The good news is that you can get a quality fruit drink without needing a blender.

There must be a misprint in the recipe or maybe the drink is misnamed, because there's no peach in the drink besides the garnish. This is mostly a strawberry lemonade with cream.

There's a lot that can go wrong when you use two ounces of lemon juice and two ounces of cream--it tends to turn into a curdled mess. You can get around this by shaking all ingredients first and then adding the cream and shaking again. This makes sure the cream is cool and suspended amid ice and other non-acidic liquids.

One other addition that I made was using my peach syrup, which did in fact add peaches to this cocktail.

• 2 oz. lemon juice
• 2 oz. half-and-half
• 1 tsp. sugar syrup (peach syrup recommended)
• 5 fresh strawberries mashed.  
• sparkling water
• fresh peach wedge

Combine syrup, lemon juice and strawberries in a shaker. Muddle the berries until they are mashed into the syrup and release their juice. Add ice and shake. Add half-and-half and shake again. Pour into a chilled Collins glass and top with sparkling water. Stir and garnish with a peach wedge.

Peachy Cream (Non-Alcoholic)

Kind of like a peach fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt. It's sweet and creamy--almost too sweet and peachy for my taste. In the photo, I left the two liquids combined but not well stirred so you can see the peach nectar and the cream. If you stir well, though the lumpiness works itself out into a smooth and, yes, peach yogurt-like drink.

• 2 oz. peach nectar
• 2 oz. half-and-half

Combine both ingredients in an Old Fashioned glass full of ice and stir well.

Shirley Temple (Non-Alcoholic)

The Shirley Temple is a pretty bastardized non-alcoholic cocktail--one I would never order at a bar because you're likely to get a Sprite loaded with tons of cheap grenadine. It's like diabetes in a glass.

What if there was a good recipe for the Shirley Temple that revived and vindicated the young actress' favorite bar drink? Turns out there is. And when you use fresh juice and serve it in an Old Fashioned glass, you have a mocktail that looks like an Old Fashioned and tastes like summer.

• 2 oz. lemon juice
• 1/2 oz. simple syrup
• 1/2 oz. pomegranate syrup (or grenadine if you must)
• ginger ale
• maraschino cherry
• lemon wedge

Combine lemon juice and syrups in a shaker with ice. Shake and strain into an Old Fashioned glass full of ice. Top with ginger ale and stir gently. Garnish with a maraschino cherry and lemon wedge.