Sandra Lee’s Ninth Ring of Hell: Dynamite Drinks

CHAPTER 9: TREACHERY OF CAINA, ANTENORA, PTOLOMEA, JUDECCA—FROZEN IN A LAKE OF ICE TO VARYING DEGREES WITH SATAN IN THE CENTER

We’ve made it to the last chapter of this cookbook—WOOT!

How sweet it is—we have come to the end, and now Aunt Sandy will show the budding kid chefs where she really shines: COCKTAIL TIME!

Love the little title card they created for the segment

If you’ve never seen a single episode of her TV show from the aughts, just look up her cocktails on YouTube to see Sandra at her most lively and animated. Typically carrying two or more bottles of alcohol (usually vanilla vodka and some other strong liquor), Sandy will sashay into the kitchen and shimmy a bit as she announces it’s Cocktail Time! Then, she mixes together tons of alcohol with a bit of juice or something sweet in a blender or pitcher—enough to knock out an entire sorority—pours herself a glass, and takes a BIG sip at the end of the segment.

Sandra Lee in bliss with FOUR bottles of alcohol

This part of her show was as iconic as her bizarre tablescapes that crowd up the table with as much junk as you could buy from Michael’s.

My compliment for the day: I absolutely adore this disco ball-themed tablescape for obvious reasons. So fun and creative!

And how perfect is it that her last chapter in Cool Kids’ Cooking is not only about drinks, but is also a wonderful match with the frozen level of Hell in Dante’s Inferno. What serendipity!

Satan weeping about Cool Kids’ Cooking

Sandra did occasionally make Kiddie Cocktails on her program that were non-alcoholic, but you could always tell she wanted to spike her glass with something stronger immediately haha. And yes, that is the exact term she used on the show (gotta start them young, dontcha know!).

Anyway, let’s get to the introduction to this chapter. It’s one of my favorites because it’s seriously insane and lists Andrew Cuomo’s children along with a bunch of other names I don’t recognize. As you may recall from my previous posts, each of the chapters focuses on one of Aunt Sandy’s nieces or nephews. I’m guessing this list tossed together at the very end was her way to cover the names of every child she’s known (it’s seriously a LONG list) as well as her paramour’s offspring.

Dynamite Drinks begins with a direct shot at Harry Potter and gets crazier from there:

Goblet of fire, shmire. A goblet of cool is so much…well, cooler. Or so say Taner, Rachel, Josh, Jacob, Cara, Mariah, Michaela, Christian, Aria, Talia, Jack, Amanda, Kyle, Hanna, Max, and Kaitlyn—the coolest kids I know. Tropical Cooler, Mango Tango, or Watermelon Spritzy, this chapter lets the whole gang sip their snacks morning, noon, and night. A Minty Chip Frappé is fit for an ice princess, while a Blue Lagoon will make any guy one chill dude. Sour Grapes? Absolutely! And an Orange Fizzy too. Pour on the charm with Fruity Lemonade—zowie, it’s like love at first sight. Hey, choice is good. So break out the beverages, chill, and blend on. Cheers!

So much is going on in this intro, and I don’t even have to list the eight drink recipe titles because Sandy has done it for me—sweet! I also am somewhat surprised that she talked about an “ice princess” years before Frozen came out. Sandra Lee is psychic, perhaps? Or she doesn’t know it’s a pejorative term for a cold woman lol.

And that list of children, by the way, reminds me of Cletus yelling for all of his kids on The Simpsons. So many names!

Before I dissect the recipes, I just wanted to point out that you can actually watch Sandy make the Watermelon Spritzy with one of Cuomo’s daughters online. Honeydew melon makes an appearance again in the actual recipe in the book, and the skewer used as a garnish (as seen in the chapter drawing) seems so cumbersome to me!

Anyway, for this final post, I will be focusing on three of the eight recipes in the intro: Orange Fizzy. Fruity Lemonade, and Blue Lagoon.

Let’s start with something I would never choose to imbibe willingly. I really dislike oranges in any form (especially orange juice with pulp—ugh), so the Orange Fizzy looks especially nauseating to me.

Its ingredients are an orange, orange juice, milk, ice, and powdered sugar. I would think the juice would be sweet enough, but Aunt Sandy insists on adding more sugar into these Kiddie Cocktails.

Not so bad, I guess, but I am baffled once more by the recipe title. No part of this includes carbonation, so how exactly is it “fizzy”? The recipe itself says to blend everything until it is “smooth and frothy,” so I would think that would be a more accurate adjective for the drink. Perhaps “Orange Frothy” sounds too much like “Orange Frosty,” and Sandra Lee didn’t want to get sued by Wendy’s.

The final line of the recipe truly exemplifies the Semi-Ho methodology:

Garnish glasses with an orange slice (optional).

So, Sandra uses store-bought orange juice rather than juicing the orange she has as an ingredient and then suggests using that fruit as a garnish? It’s so backwards, I feel like I’m through the looking glass and everything is topsy turvy (or more accurately “tipsy turvy” as my autocorrect suggested that encapsulates Sandra Lee’s boozy concepts).

The next recipe is Fruity Lemonade, which features a very demure drawing of Aunt Sandy in a straw hat and pink and purple one-piece swimsuit with a lilac sarong, daintily crossing her legs and sipping her drink. The recipe includes a lemon (guess what THAT is used for), water, thawed lemonade concentrate, sugar, a teaspoon of sugar-free peach flavor Jell-O gelatin, a half teaspoon of unsweetened tropical punch Kool-Aid mix, and ice.

I don’t think Sandra Lee would ever be this covered up lol

Can you guess what ingredient irritated me when I first read this recipe? That’s right: the sugar-free peach gelatin. First, why is she adding sugar to this drink and then using unsweetened or sugar-free items? It makes no sense whatsoever.

Secondly, this gelatin is not heated up in any way, so there is no possibility that it would dissolve properly. I speak from experience. When I was a teenager, my mom would make my three siblings and me choose one day each week and make dinner for everyone during the summer. It wasn’t a bad idea by any means, but I remember ambitiously thinking I could make a watermelon mousse recipe that I had found in a cookbook. It sounded easy, but I remember how devastated I was when the gelatin did not dissolve properly despite me stirring it in boiling water for the recommended amount of time. The mousse ended up being grainy and inedible, so it was a huge disappointment.

My point is gelatin tastes awful if it hasn’t been dissolved correctly. And to add this to lemonade for no discernible reason aside from including yet another packaged product makes me sick. Plus, it’s sugar-free, meaning it is likely full of aspartame? So disturbing, and I would be furious if someone handed this to me and called it lemonade. Give me the real stuff, please!

The final recipe is Blue Lagoon. Along with a drawing of kids drinking blue liquid from a fish bowl, this drink includes unsweetened berry blue or blue raspberry Kool-Aid drink mix, sugar, water, and lemonade with “fish-shape candies.” I have three issues with this list right off the bat (I am ignoring the fishbowl thing for now haha).

Let’s just be glad it’s not Hypnotiq like her other blue cocktail (IYKYK)

First, Sandy has once again used both unsweetened Kool-Aid AND sugar, which is confusing to say the least. I doubt that the drink mix with sugar is worse than adding a cup of sugar to the unsweetened version.

Second, the recipe that’s called Fruity Lemonade uses frozen concentrate lemonade while the Blue Lagoon has 4 cups of lemonade. How does any of this make sense to her? I guess all that booze has really pickled her brain.

Third, who does Sandra Lee think she is fooling by calling the multicolor fish “fish-shape candies” (and shouldn’t it be “fish-shaped” with a “d”)?Anyone can see the candies are Swedish Fish. Now if that company chose to not collaborate with her AND restricted the use of that term, all I can say is bravo and thank you for having more integrity than Philadelphia Cream Cheese (see Chapter 8 for the specifics on that betrayal).

UPDATE: After doing some research on the topic, I found out that BOTH the cream cheese brand and Swedish Fish products are owned by the same conglomerate: Mondolēz International. So my conclusion is that I truly have NO idea why she couldn’t use the proper name of the candy.

Anyway, let’s look at how she creates this bizarre concoction and why it’s called Blue Lagoon. You start by freezing the blue drink mix in an ice cube tray overnight.

They did add a line that says it needs to be frozen at the top of the recipe, but I definitely would not have known that based on the drawing. Somewhat deceptive if you ask me.

Once the ice cubes are frozen, you then have to make “fishing poles.” How is this convenient and semi-homemade? I’m not about to do all of this tedious work for a DRINK, Sandy! Here’s the exact directions:

Have an adult help you make fishing poles. Using a needle and thread, run a “fishing line” through the heads of 4 fish-shape candies. Tie onto the ends of four 6-inch skewers.

I would never put this much effort into a garnish to justify the title’s use of the word “lagoon.” Surely there is some other way. Hell, just forget the skewers and toss more fish into the drink if you want—at least that way it doesn’t involve using a needle and string.

The final element of this crazy recipe is the “Party Idea” as depicted in the drawing. Here’s the explanation:

Arrange ice cubes in a clean new fish bowl. Pour lemonade over ice cubes; add 4 straws and 8 fish-shape candies. Garnish with fishing poles.

Okay, now let’s go back to the drawing. As you can see, it does not match the description above. The recipe calls for 4 straws while the fish bowl has 2, and there are only four visible fish candies when there should be 8.

Also, I can’t stop laughing about the editors adding that the fish bowl should be “clean.” Yeah, I was planning to just rinse out the old bowl I had for my goldfish before I saw that message. Duly noted!

Finally, you can tell Sandra Lee doesn’t really have that much experience with rambunctious children. I know for a fact that my two kids would either knock the fish bowl off the table somehow or try to dip their fingers into the drink to grab the fish candies. This recipe is one of her silliest and is the perfect conclusion to my nine-part series.

As a special bonus, I have to share this image and video footage of the most grotesque “healthy” AFC abomination that even rivals the infamous Kwanzaa Kake. Someone online said that it looks like she put raw chicken breasts on top (it’s actually a combination of thawed peaches, peach gelatin, and ricotta), and now I cannot unsee that!

Truly the stuff of nightmares

So that’s it. I have been writing about this Sandra Lee cookbook since 2007, and now I have finished the final chapter nearly 20 years later. When I had first embarked on this endeavor, I had noted that the Aunt Sandy drawings in the book look like her trying to be a teenager when she was actually a “40-something” woman:

Oh…by the way, the entire book is illustrated with this bizarre cartoon of “adult” Sandra (oh please…maybe it was realistic when she was 15, but not her current 40-something self) who wears this lame necklace that says “Sandy.”

Well, now I AM a woman in that exact age range (43 years old as of this writing), and I’m so thankful that I created my website and was able to put in the time and energy to FINALLY complete this project and share it with the masses.

Thank you to my readers throughout the years for indulging me in posting about an old Food Network personality, and I wish you all Dish Delish!

If you’d like to read the first eight chapters of my analysis of Cool Kids’ Cooking, please click here.