Simple, eye-catching, and emphatically lowbrow, the Tattletale is the perfect cocktail for those estranged from their bar while traveling or those who never had one to begin with. The keystone ingredient in this strange drink is marshmallow cream: a kind of sugary paste originally invented in 1902 as a more traditional candy before slowly transforming into the laboratory space-paste found in grocery stores today. For us, it fits nicely into one of our favorite styles of recipe to cover: one with a short and humble ingredient list that includes a bizarre twist that doesn’t require a trip to the fanciest liquor store in town. “I like the idea of using junk to make something really good,” said Benjamin Amberg about this drink. It comes from Clyde Commons in Portland, and was created by Heather Sang and Amberg. We discovered it in the book The One-Bottle Cocktail, which is chocked full of cheeky gems like this one.

The strange group of ingredients employed in this cocktail come together in a remarkably cohesive way. It is sweet and tart at first, with wonderful baking spices on the nose as well as the finish, which comes with additional notes of vanilla and apple. The core of this drink is not far from a Margarita, but the addition of the marshmallow cream, which adds an egg-like thickness, as well as the intense baking spices from the apple butter helps the drink to dramatically depart from the classic formula that inspired it. After trying it, our first thought was why more recipes didn’t include marshmallow cream. The original recipe instructs to blend the ingredients together in a cocktail shaker with an immersion blender. This idea makes a lot of sense, but our immersion blender didn’t fit in the bottom of our shaker, and the results were an absolute mess. If you can’t fully immerse yours either, we recommend starting with a larger container or using a traditional blender. If you don’t have apple butter but do have pear or pumpkin butter, those should work nearly as well. Pear butter in particular fits the wintry flavors of this drink nicely.