Homemade Tropical Liqueur

If you like Malibu you’ll just love my homemade tropical liqueur as it’s even better! With its totally tropical flavours of rum, coconut, pineapple, banana and spices this is a holiday in a glass!

Why you’ll love this recipe

• This is like a Malubu cocktail and not something you’ll buy in the shops
• It’s fun to make your own homemade liqueurs and they make terrific gifts too
• My homemade tropical liqueur is super easy to make and of course it tastes amazing!

I’ve been making homemade liqueurs and infusions for years and sharing many of my recipes here on Larder Love and making them at Food shows and on TV too.

This homemade tropical liqueur was made for my Foodie Gifts For Christmas Book 2 and I made it every day at the Country Living Christmas Fair last year and everyone loved it.

Ingredients for my tropical liqueur

This tropical liqueur is a real store cupboard recipe with only one fresh ingredient and that’s the bananas that are no doubt lurking in your fruit bowl already.

The booze – This is a rum-based liqueur and I’ve used basic supermarket brand white rum.

Bananas – nice ripe bananas here please. You want them yellow, not unripe green but not brown and spotty as the former doesn’t have enough sweetness and the latter is just too sweet.

Pineapple – I tried making this tropical liqueur using fresh pineapple but honestly I found using tinned pineapple to be the best. I used tinned pineapple in juice as you get more pineapple flavour than the pineapple in syrup.

Coconut – No self-respecting tropical liqueur would be without that all-important coconut. Good old desiccated coconut is needed here.

Spices – You want some warming Caribbean spices for your tropical liqueur so you want some nutmeg and vanilla.

Sugar – you need this to add sweetness to your liqueur and it wouldn’t be a liqueur without sugar. You want plain white sugar here as brown sugar has a richer more caramel-like flavour which would overpower the fruit here.

Pro tips

If you use dark rum your homemade tropical liqueur will be stronger and deeper in flavour, not the fun light liqueur we are going for but still a nice drink.

How to make homemade tropical liqueur

It is super easy to make this copycat Malibu recipe, there are just a few simple steps.

Firstly heat the sugar along with the juice from the tinned pineapple in a small pan till the sugar has dissolved then mash the banana into the pineapple syrup till quite smooth.

Pour this into a large jar and add the desiccated coconut, nutmeg, vanilla, pineapple (chop first if it isn’t chopped already) and the all-important rum.

Use a wooden spoon or pestle to muddle everything together so it is well blended in the jar.

To stop the banana discolouring in the air at the top of the jar use a piece of clingfilm and press this onto the top of the liqueur ingredients so that air cannot touch it.

If you don’t do this then the bananas on top can oxidize and go brown. It won’t affect the taste of your coconut liqueur but will make it more brownish in colour rather than the pale golden yellow you see here.

Then simply pop on the lid and leave the jar to sit in a cool cupboard for one week.

The rum will leach all the flavours out of the coconut, banana and pineapple during this time.

After a week empty the jar into a plastic sieve over a jug and use a wooden spoon to press out as much liquid as you can.

The resulting liquid will be very cloudy with bits in it.

Take another jug and this time time add a plastic sieve with two layers of kitchen paper and pour the tropical liqueur through this. The kitchen roll will act as a filter to hold back all the little fibres and bits and pieces giving you a clearer liqueur.

Decant your homemade tropical liqueur into a sterilised bottle and that’s it.

You can use the leftover discarded solids to make homemade tropical ice-cream.

How long will this keep?

Homemade tropical liqueur will keep for up to a year in a cupboard. Bet you’ll have polished it off long before then though!

How to serve homemade tropical liqueur

You can chill a bottle of your coconut liqueur in the freezer and serve it in little frozen shot glasses or just serve it as a shot or over ice.

Serve this coconut and pineapple liqueur with a mixer of your choice like lemonade or soda water. It goes well with ginger ale too.

Homemade tropical liqueur is great in cocktails too. Try it as a tropical martini with a shot of vodka and banana and pineapple on a cocktail stick to swirl.

Make a Tropical Sunset cocktail with some Grenadine for that rich red base, your homemade tropical rum liqueur and orange juice to top it up, cheers!

looking for more fun homemade liqueurs to try? Then check these out before you go;

Super easy marmalade orange vodka

Homemade spiced rum

Toffee liqueur

Copycat homemade Baileys

Christmas cranberry gin liqueur

And if you want even more boozy inspiration then head over to my homemade Liqueurs And Infusions for a whole host of ideas.

Finally, if you do try this recipe don’t forget to leave a comment/star rating below as I just love to hear from readers. Want more Larder Love? Then follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter and sign up for my newsletter too of course.