Secrets revealed: The Love Punch

Recently I volunteered to make the punch for a holiday party. Sometimes, when you have a wicked good recipe and you know it's really that good, it becomes difficult to suppress the amazingness that should be shared and enjoyed.


The irony of the punch experience was that, after a day of lovingly layering an ice-mold of fresh sliced strawberries and sprigs of mint, I arrived at the designated set-up hour to fill the punch bowl, which was surprisingly shaped like a bowl for fish. My ornate ice mold, which had been layered into a fluted pan, was absolutely not going to fit into the narrow opening of the punch bowl!


In the end, the host's love for the punch bowl won out over my love for the ice mold, and five minutes later I was tiptoeing barefoot out to the sidewalk with the ice mold in a plastic bag, to drop it onto the cement and break it. Luckily, with all of the other action going on in the punch bowl, nobody noticed that the ice mold was floating in pieces.


The Love Punch
(Spontaneously named for the heart-shaped ice cubes I added to the bowl)

1 liter of lemon-lime flavored soda (7-up, Sprite, etc.)
1 can of frozen white grape juice, made to direction (meaning, add the 3 cans of water)
3 bags of Bigelow Perfect Peach herbal tea, with the strings snipped
Ice

I was skeptical at first that the herbal tea bags would do their duty without being steeped in hot water, but trust me, if you set them into the cold drink for just a few minutes they will flavor the entire bowl with just a hint of something that nobody can put their finger on, but everybody will love!

P.S. If anyone figures out a clever way to weigh the tea bags to the bottom of the bowl, let me know. Because they are not extremely sightly and some people object to having tea bags in their punch, I also briefly thought about taking them out after a few minutes, but... I couldn't be bothered.