Happy Monday, friends! Anyone else moving a little slower than normal today? The Super Bowl food hangover is real!

Valentine’s Day is next week, and while I’m single, I don’t mind the holiday. It’s low key enough that you could get by just doing your normal thing—especially since it falls on a Wednesday!—but is also a good excuse to hang out with your girlfriends and enjoy some fun, flirty drinks.

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know that my Valentine’s Day tradition is to hang with my BFF Molly. We live in different cities now, so we’re moving our festivities to the weekend after. We’re both big cold weather haters, so a tropical, fruity cocktail is just what the doctor ordered.

Recently, Oregon Fruit reached out and asked me if I’d like to try their red tart cherries in a cocktail. I’m not a huge fan of eating cherries in their whole form, but I love cherry-flavored cocktails, and love it even more when cocktails can be made with real fruit. They just taste better! While canned red tart cherries are packed in water, these new Oregon Fruit cherries are packed in cherry juice in jars, which offers added flavor and anti-inflammatory benefits. (I’ll drink to that!)

As you’ll see in this cherry raspberry smash—which makes the perfect pink/red color for Valentine’s Day!—the cherry juice is an integral part of what makes this drink special. If you’re in the DC area, Oregon Fruit products are now sold at Harris Teeter, but if you can’t find them in your local stores, they’re also available on Amazon.

Ingredients / Serves 4

• 1 jar of Oregon Fruit red tart cherries
• 6 ounces raspberries (this is a standard grocery store carton—you could easily use frozen ones!)
• 1 tablespoon powdered sugar
• 6 ounces vodka
• Club soda, chilled for topping
• Ice
• Limes and oranges for garnish

Directions

Traditionally, a smash is an open-ended cocktail that you can change up the fruits and spirits to meet your preferences. I like to dilute mine with club soda, but if you wanted an extra punch, you could top it off with champagne. A lot of people muddle their fruits—hence “smash”—for cocktails like these, but since Oregon Fruit’s red tart cherries are pitted, I threw mine in the blender. Easy! Here are the full directions:

1. Pour the juice from one jar of Oregon Fruit red tart cherries into your blender, along with half the cherries in the jar. Add in 6 ounces of raspberries and a tablespoon of powdered sugar. Blend until smooth. (A note that a lot of smash cocktail recipes call for simple syrup—I found that the cherry juice was the perfect substitution for this!)
2. In a cocktail shaker, combine 6 ounces of vodka, ice, and blended fruit mixture. Shake vigorously.
3. Fill your cocktail glasses with a generous amount of ice. Pour shaken mixture over ice. Top with club soda and fruit garnishes.
4. Enjoy!

Thank you to Oregon Fruit for gifting me four jars of their red tart cherries for use in this post. As always, all opinions are my own.