Frozen Strawberry Mimosas

We had a full open bar at our reception, but still wanted to have some special signature drinks.  While we wanted a frozen drink, we did not want conversations drowned out by the noise of an ice crusher or blender.  With a little advance preparation, we were able to serve this delicious beverage.

Step 1 - Frozen orange strawberry mixture.  (To be prepared ahead of time.)

2 parts orange juice
1 parts Finest Call Strawberry Puree
Ice

Mix the orange juice with the strawberry puree.  Put it into a blender with enough ice cubes so that the bottom ice cubes are touching the bottom of the blender.  Blend until ice is crushed.  Pour the mixture into an ice cube tray, and freeze.  If you have more than will fit in your ice cube trays/freezer, you can do this a little at a time, and put each set into a Ziploc bag when you finish freezing them.  For reference, three cups of orange juice plus a cup and a half of strawberry puree made enough ice cubes to fill a one-gallon Ziploc bag.

Step 2 - Preparation at the site

1 gallon bag of the frozen mixture
3 cups orange juice
1½ cups strawberry puree
6 cups Prosecco

Add the frozen mixture with the orange juice and strawberry puree, and stir until well mixed.  Pour over the Prosecco.

It was light and refreshing.  Putting the juice and strawberry puree into the blender with the ice gets them much better mixed than is otherwise possible.  If we were preparing this at home, we would not have bothered freezing part of the juice and puree, but would merely blend all of them with the ice and then pour over the Prosecco.  However, we did not want to have a noisy blender running throughout our reception.  With a bit of experimentation, we discovered that blending and freezing part of the mixture beforehand produced an even texture in the drink, without requiring the blender to be operating when the drinks were actually prepared.