Mulled Apple Cider with Orange and Cinnamon

☕🥐🐈🔍

From Piper's Recipe Box

Maplebrook Mulled Cider

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The first proper cold-weather drink of the year

Prep

5 min

Simmer

30–40 min

Makes

8 mugs

There is a category of drink whose entire point is that you have to stand near it while it happens. You cannot make this and walk away. You make it, and then you hover, and the house smells like the inside of an orange for the rest of the evening. That is not a side effect. That is the product.

You'll Need

• 2 quarts apple cider — the cloudy kind, not the clear
• 2 cinnamon sticks · 6 whole cloves · 3 allspice berries
• 1 star anise, if you have it and like it
• 1 orange, sliced into rounds · 1 strip of lemon peel
• 1 tbsp maple syrup, or brown sugar, or nothing at all
• Optional, for the evening version: a splash of dark rum or bourbon

What To Do

1. Put everything except the syrup into a heavy pot over low heat. Low. If it boils, the spices turn bitter and sulky and there is no fixing it.
2. Let it sit at a bare shiver for 30–40 minutes. This is the standing-near-it part. Read something. Reorganize a shelf you did not need to reorganize.
3. Taste it. Add the syrup only if it needs it — cider varies wildly and most of it is already sweet enough.
4. Strain into mugs, float a fresh orange round on top, and if there is rum involved, add it off the heat so it does not cook away.

The cloudy cider matters more than anything else here. Clear apple juice makes a hot drink; cloudy cider makes the thing you are actually trying to make.

More from Maplebrook

No murder attached to this one — it's just what gets made in October. If you want the books the rest of these come from, they live on my author page →

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