Cocktail Hour: Champagne Charlie

Champagne cocktails are best when they're simple. Often, it's just a case of some very generous person bringing a bottle of bubbly with them when they come for dinner, and mixing it with whatever you fruit thing have to hand. Juice works well (some better than others - cranberry does not work). But apricot brandy is obviously going to work better. Apricot brandy is a wonderful invention.

You'll need: (this is simple)

• Champagne
• 50ml Apricot Brandy

Shake it! (Oooh, this is simple too!)

Add the apricot brandy to a champagne flute, top up with champage. Pretend to everyone else that it was much more complicated than it really was. Cocktails that mean you can spend more time drinking instead of shaking make me very happy indeed.

Flickr image from fontplaydotcom's photostream.