Hot Wine Punch #recipe by Maya Corrigan

I love curling up with a book and a hot drink when it's cold outside. Most of the time, that drink is tea, but occasionally I like something stronger. This wine punch fits the bill. While punch is usually served to large gatherings, this punch is easily made for one person or a small group. The recipe for a a larger group is included in Bake Offed, my 8th Five-Ingredient Mystery. 

Bake Offed takes place at a mystery fan festival, where café manager, Val, and her grandfather are volunteers. Granddad promotes his Codger Cook recipe column and website to the mystery fans by creating a dinner menu based on the Clue board game. The dishes are named for the suspects in the game. Each dish has five or fewer ingredients. 

When I was testing recipes to include in the book, I had no trouble coming up with ones that had Green, Mustard, White, and Plum in their titles. A Peacocktail was an obvious recipe to include. Cocktail-making isn't one of my skills, so I asked my Millennial nephew to invent a blue cocktail, which he enjoyed doing and held multiple tastings until it was just right. That left Scarlet as the only suspect without a dish named after her. Then I came across a recipe called Hot Scarlet Wine Punch in a 20-year-old cookbook. I simplified the recipe by cutting down on the number of ingredients and on the amounts. I've never tried a punch that I liked as much as this one. Here is a single-serving recipe for Hot Miss Scarlet Punch.  

Adapted from a recipe in Better Homes and Gardens 500 Five-Ingredient Recipes, 2002.

Ingredients

3 ounces cranberry juice cocktail
1½ teaspoons brown sugar
1 clove (or a scant 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves)
1 cinnamon stick (or a scant 1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon)
2.5 ounces dry white wine

Heat the first four ingredients in a small saucepan. Bring the mix to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer for five minutes uncovered. Remove the clove and cinnamon stick. If you've used ground spices you can leave them in the punch. Add the wine and heat the mixture. Serve in a glass or a punch cup.

Do you like sampling punch at a party? 

If tea is your preferred hot drink, what kind to you like? 

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Val and Granddad attend a mystery fan fest that features a bake-off between contestants playing the roles of cooks to fictional sleuths. As Nero Wolfe’s gourmet chef, Granddad competes against Sherlock Holmes's landlady Mrs. Hudson, played by Cynthia Sweet. Granddad blames her for ripping off the five-ingredient theme of his Codger Cook newspaper column to use in her own recipe column and cookbook. When she’s found dead in her hotel room with a whistling teakettle next to her, he and Val sort through the festival-goers to find the one with the biggest beef against Ms. Not-So-Sweet.

Maya Corrigan writes the Five-Ingredient Mysteries featuring café manger Val and her live-wire grandfather solving murders in a Chesapeake Bay town. Maya lives in a Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. Before writing crime fiction, she taught American literature, writing, and detective fiction at Northern Virginia Community College and Georgetown University. When not reading and writing, she enjoys theater, travel, trivia, cooking, and crosswords.

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