The Glorious Book of Curious Cocktails

The Glorious Book of Curious Cocktails is a disgustingly delicious recipe book which teaches children all about onomatopoeia, alliteration and other literary devices. This humorous book contains ridiculous recipes, fun activity pages and real recipes that children can make using edible ingredients. Children are encouraged to use language and drawing to invent their own silly recipes, developing literacy skills and imagination.

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One day, my little boy observed me illustrating cocktails for a drinks menu I was working on and he started laughing, hysterically.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

“You don’t put limes in drinks, silly!” He said.

(Apparently, putting bits of fruit and leaves in drinks is absolutely crazy to a four year old.)

I asked him what he would put into a drink if he could make up a really silly cocktail and so we spent the next hour thinking up ridiculous ingredients and drawing our own disgusting drinks made of slugs, worms and other revolting things. We learnt about literary devices such as onomatopoeia and alliteration as we wrote out our silly recipes. I then illustrated the recipes and I decided to compile our ideas into a book: and so, The Glorious Book of Curious Cocktails was born.

I wanted the book to be for both children and adults - beautiful to hold and look through yet utterly disgusting.

This book is all about imagination and learning through fun. There is a section at the back for children to invent their own ridiculous recipes, writing their own ingredients and drawing pictures – using fun and imagination to problem solve through design and language. As well as nonsensical recipes there are recipes that are can be made with edible ingredients, giving an understanding of working with measurements and how different liquids and solids react when mixed together. This book involves imagination, problem solving, design, literacy, measuring and working with different materials, making learning fun in the process. I created the full design and content of the book, from recipe ideas, illustrations, hand drawn lettering, fonts, design and layout.

Drinks included in the recipe book: Slime and Tonic, Eyeballtini, Farty Fizz, The Bees Knees, Jungle juice, Stink Bomb, Snappy Surprise, Crusty Colada, The Goofy Guzzler and The Fluffy Critter.

The font I created for the book

All the titles are hand drawn.

Icons I created to represent each cocktail.

There are pages at the back for children to invent their own silly cocktails

A real curious cocktail made with orangutan poo, spider's legs, worms, beetle juice, jungle leaves and grubs. These are actually all edible ingredients (and it tastes really good!).

Another curious cocktail made with leeches, snot, slime, snake's skin and pond algae,

The 'Jungle Juice' cocktail, containing grubs, snakeskin, tarantula legs, scorpion's tail and orangutang poo.

A fun animated gif I created to support the book

Cocktail side effects: Itching, tiredness, sneezing, farting, nausea, vomiting, purple spots, excessive joke-telling, loss of appetite, loss of colour vision, loss of limbs, sleeplessness, irritability, blowing bubbles, hair loss, hair growth, fish tail growth, rashes, bad body odour, sores, loss of speech, crazy dance moves, fear of drinking cocktails.

The response:

"Imaginative, educational, funny and beautifully illustrated."

"Thanks for the book. My daughter (age 4.5) wanted it reading in bed three nights on the trot last week, which has never happened on any other book."

"I spent 40 minutes reading it this morning to my three year old. She was utterly captivated. Amazing."

"The beautiful illustrations, design and layout look absolutely stunning in print. Wow! I had planned for it to be a present but I may need to reconsider."