Whipped Cream + Alcohol...Yes

A friend of mine told me about Whipped Lightening, an alcohol-infused whipped cream in a can. How could this not be a good thing? It comes in multiple flavors and the website includes recipe ideas. I knew I had to try this.

The problem is that the closest store to sell it is near Baltimore and I was not renting a car to buy whipped cream. So since I had a lot of heavy whipping cream and a number of liquors I decided to try making my own. I had a couple girlfriends over and we narrowed down my collection to four likely suspects.

I've never added another liquid to the heavy cream so I didn't know how much I could add before the cream would no longer whip; so there was a lot of trial and error. You also might be asking yourself, Why would I need alcohol-infused whipped cream? Well that's a good question; but really why wouldn't you? I think it would just be a nice touch to desserts, a way to dress up coffees, top off a jello shot, whatever you want really.

We started with the Malibu.

I love coconut so I figured this would be really good. And it was pretty good. Our scientific method, which involved eating a lot of whipped cream, discovered the following:

Pros:
Yum coconut
Could do with a lot of things (anything chocolate, top of a pina colada, coffee, etc)

Cons:
Could definitely taste the alcohol burn of rum

We believe that a small addition of coconut milk (milk not cream as cream of coconut would break down the heavy cream) would help mask the rum and enhance the flavor.

Next up was the Buttershots.

This was the clear winner for all of us. My notes from our tasting only say "Yay!".

The Buttershots was followed by Godiva.

Aesthetically not quite as pretty as Godiva is a dark brown so it did color the whipped cream a little. Contrary to the Buttershots when we had nothing bad to say, with the Godiva we really had little good to say. With this we could also taste the burn of alcohol but, unlike the Malibu with which the coconut flavor was still very much evident, we couldn't taste any chocolate at all. We decided this was a good concept but could be helped along maybe by a small amount of cocoa powder or Hershey's syrup. It would also be interesting to experiment with some mixes and use both the Malibu and Godiva. Or Godiva and Chambord.

You can see how this experiment could have gone of forever.

However I only had a limited amount of heavy cream so we ended the project after the fourth liquor...root beer flavored vodka. (You might also be asking why would I have that. My answer is the same; why wouldn't I have that?)

This too had the heavy burn but like the Malibu you could still very much taste the root beer. The real problem with this one is the very limited application. Pretty much you could use it to top off root beer floats.

I would definitely still like to get my hands on some of the Whipped Lightening...largely because they have flavors like German Chocolate and Pumpkin Spice and I'm not sure how to make those on my own. It certainly was a fun experiment and I can see myself putting this to use in future dessert recipes. Especially since we're still in the dead of winter (when DC remember that it's winter and it's not 60 F that is) and I can see this nicely topping off hot chocolate.