This evening, with any luck, my flat will be full of people drinking cocktails and eating pizza and cake.I like cocktails and I like food and I like making both for my friends but it’s fair to say that I’m a huge fan of the ‘good enough’. I’m not an expert and my friends know that, they are not expecting my house to turn into the Savoy for the evening!I offer a couple of choices of drink and the food is designed to soak up the booze!

This year the cocktails are:

Aperol Spritz

Summer in a glass

The Peach thing (no name or a photo yet but I tested it on Kathy and Adam last Sunday and they approve.)

Rhubarb Fizz (no photo of this one either)

Japanese Slipper

Perfect Manhattan

Gin Martini

The last two are mostly for Ma!

It just makes sense to make cocktails that use the same core ingredients over several cocktails, which for this seems to be gin and fizz, however, I have emergency vodka on hand for the strange people (I’m looking at you Maxanne!) who don’t drink gin. For people that don’t drink at all, yes I do know some!, the rhubarb and peach thing can be made non-alcoholic.

Other top tips – you can never have too many glasses or ice and set the glasses out before the party.  Spend some time before the party juicing the lemons and any other citrus you’re using. Set up an area for making cocktails with all the ingredients to hand and write the quantities of each drinks down and pin the list somewhere in your eye line, there will be a point when you forget what goes in each. If you don’t have a double sink set up a bucket for used ice. Make use of your friends to do stuff you can’t, tasks include answering the door and handing out food.

Any party tips from you lot?