The original recipe was one that I've made often as a substitute to Mother's Milk. I've posted this recipe before but it's been awhile. It's not as sweet as Mother's Milk (although, I swear the recipe has changed at least three times over the past two years) however it's good with either V1 or V2 ingredients. Both I and my husband prefer V2. I can't taste the difference and my husband I think liked V2 ingredient version better because, maybe (it's been awhile) it wasn't as sweet.
When I initially made this, I wanted an equally gross name as Mother's Milk so I called it Trickle Down. So I give you:
Trickle Down
CAP Vanilla Custard V2 4%
CAP Sweet STrawberry 5%
TPA/TFA Graham Cracker Crust 1/5%
CAP Bavarian Cream 2%
CAP Sweet Cream 2%
I've tried this between 60VG/40PG, 70VG/30PG, and 80VG/20PG. I think the 70/30 mix is probably best but I use the 80/20 mix because I worry about PG causing coughing.
Anyway, between this recipe and Space Jam's Pluto clone, I haven't found a recipe that my husband wants more than one bottle of because he's picky. He might get through a few ounces of something when I mix a larger bottle, but then he's done and doesn't want to pick it up again.
I felt there had to be a way to somehow copy the first recipe and change it so that the hubs wouldn't grow sick of it. I've subsituted in a blueberry (sorry can't remember which one) and he vaped a bit of that, but once again, didn't want anymore made and I was left with half a bottle.
I had bought some Inawera (INW) Shisha strawberry and INW Shisha Vanilla and thought perhaps subbing in the shisha strawberry for the sweet strawberry could work. But I worried he'd still get flavor fatigue. Subbing in Shisha vanilla for one of the creams or the custard seemed like too much shisha.
I decided to dig through my bag of flavors and try to come up with 1:1 substitutions and just make a bottle and see where I was at and go from there.
Vanilla Custard was changed to Vanilla Bean Ice cream because I hadn't been able to experiment with it yet (though I do want to try citrus punch with it.)
Sweet Strawberry --> Shisha Strawberry
Graham cracker crust was tough because I didn't have something similar. So I took a risk that the cinnamon wouldn't be too intrusive at such a low level and used Cinnamon Danish Swirl because I thought maybe the slight pastry would be a decent stand in for a pastry crust.
Subbing out Bavarian cream was tough. I didn't want to. This is seriously a great flavor, and I could have kept it the same with probably no regrets, but I wanted to stick to not using any of the same ingredients. I would like to go back and sub this back in and see how it reacts with the other flavors. In any event, Bavarian Cream was subbed out for Cream Cheese Icing.
At this point I was scraping the bottom of the barrel of anything even remotely cream like. I didn't want to use Whipped cream because I had used that plenty of times as a stand in for sweet cream and not noticed a difference in the final product. I therefore went off script because I had pulled out yellow cake and fig and had them off to the side thinking maybe I could create a fig and yellow cake pastry that wouldn't be too objectionable to my husband's palette. Therefore, I decided to split the 2% of Sweet cream into 1% of each, fig and yellow cake thinking such minute amounts wouldn't (crossing fingers) ruin the recipe since they weren't cream flavors at all.
New Recipe's name is:
Bad Cousin
CAP (or FW, done it both ways) Vanilla Bean Ice Cream 4.5%
INW Shisha Strawberry 5.5% (or you can sub in another strawberry if incense isn't your thing)
CAP Cinnamon Danish Swirl 1.5%
Lorann Cream Cheese Icing 2%
CAP Fig 1% (this was later changed to .75, and honestly, I might even try .5 next time)
FW Yellow Cake 1% (changed to .75% but it could happily stay at 1%)
The differences between Capella and Flavor West's Vanilla Bean Ice cream since that was the only difference between my first try and my second try (except bringing Fig and Yellow cake down from 1% to .75%, and also having to top off the shisha with sweet strawberry because I ran out the 2nd time) is that it seems harsher. I recommend Capella's more, however if you only have Flavor west, you'll be fine with their VBIC. Husband has not complained and he's awful when I ask for specific notes. He either likes it or he doesn't, and anything beyond that is rare. This time was no different, so you will have to rely on my tasting notes.
Shocker-- doesn't taste like Trickle Down :P
Even though FW VBIC is harsher than CAP VBIC, it's still very vapeable. What was initially supposed to be 4% Vanilla Custard Substitute and 5% Strawberry substitute wound up being 4.5 and 5.5 respectively because I accidentally added too much. The entire recipe is 15% flavor so it's not too far off, but I would like to try bringing the percentages down and seeing if Husband noticed a difference. I personally think that the flavor could be sweetened, but I haven't been able to utilize sweeteners with any success. It's been very mediocre results when I've added ethyl malitol in the form of cotton candy and it's not due to the muting effect, so I have mostly skipped messing with sweeteners though I am interested in liquid stevia.
What does it taste like?
Incense. Strawberry. And then like a slightly dark berry jam-y tart with a lot of seeds. It's good. I could forego the incense, but I really do like the jam-like fruit tart where there is not a lot of pastry/cake getting in the way. The beginning taste of the incense makes way to the jam tart, and the after taste for me is pleasing.
The shisha strawberry is expectedly very incense-y. I was worried that this would be as alienating as floral tastes in eliquid, but surprisingly it hasn't been. It's unusual and it certainly is different. I'm not a huge fan of vaping something incense-y, so for me, I would either kick this down and partially sub in a different strawberry (or fruit-- perhaps fiji apple might need to make an appearance in a future iteration), or completely ignore Shisha Strawberry and go back to Sweet Strawberry. Between the 2 versions, I would say my Husband has gone through 3 ounces in the last ten days, breaking only to clear his palette for a short time and then go right back to vaping this. It has been, seriously, a surprise. (note: my second version of this, I ran out of shisha strawberry, so it wound up being something like 4% Shisha Strawberry and 1.5% Sweet Strawberry. I asked Husband if he noticed a difference and he said no. I explained the substitution thinking maybe he would consider the strawberry more carefully and he again said no he did not taste a difference-- so that's good if you run out and need to sub in more strawberry from a different vendor.
I think, but need to try it a bit more, that the cream cheese icing stands in nicely. Sour is the wrong word, but it mutes the sweetness a lot more so instead of this being a Dunkin' Donuts high fructose corn syrup fruit danish, it's more like something I would think was homemade or from a small german bakery-- the "real" way, to be a bit snobby. I do want to play around with it more because I think it could be a better fruit danish if that's what I was going for, but to stumble on something that Hub is practically chain vaping, I'll just accept the good fortunate bumbling.
Fig is, naturally, a pain to use.* I've used it in a couple of things but nothing has really impressed me and I feel that it will hog the stage if given the opportunity. ,75% is fine, but .50% might be better especially if you want to see what other fruit flavors you can get to come through. I don't taste strawberry much compared to trickle down, and fig is not something I get-- there's definitely some in there, but it's more like fig and a dark raspberry (and I don't like raspberry flavors at all. I do like this though.)
I feel like, between these two recipes, it provides a good playground to play with any of the 11 flavors in 5 or 6 flavor configurations and see what happens. Naturally, one could even sub in other stuff since it feels like it's impossible to see a recipe on here and actually have all the flavors already available.
Hope this helps someone out. Let me know what you think, and what your substitutions were.
- if it helps anyone, I think a long time ago I did a version of chai tea eliquid that had blackberry, fig, cardamom, and chai tea and I remember it being very tasty. Husband did not care for it, so I never made it again. But if you too have fig that you don't know what to do with, maybe those other flavors will help you.
That is an interesting way to use fig. That CAP Cinnamon Danish Swirl will really mask a lighter fruit flavoring given the opportunity. Awesome write up.
In my experience it's been rare to be able to "brute force" a flavor into a recipe. Sometimes you might get something just okay. I think forcing fig into this is better than okay, but it still needs work. I probably won't be able to play with the recipe too much because of how hard it is to find something my husband likes this much, but there's definitely room for improvement. If someone else has any succesful fig recipes, let me know.
That's an awfully high % for Shisha strawberry. Try 3%, should be much less incensey. First time I've heard of that, actually. 1-3% JF Strawberry or just regular INW Strawberry would work (por que no los dos?)
I'll try that! Or, like I said, dropping the shisha for sweet strawberry.
I have just made a Strawberry Ice Cream flavour using Inawera Sisha Strawb, It is very strong, I used it at 1% along side 4% TFA ripe strawb and 4% TFA strawb, I've mixed that with 5% VBIC (TFA) and it tastes awesome.
I would definitely recommend using Inawera Sisha Strawb at a much lower percent, and adding another strawberry to make up the difference in percent, I have found (In my limited experience) mixing different types of a certain flavour usually ends up with a much fuller version of the flavour you are looking for.
For a 30ml of my mother's milk clone I use 2.5ml CAP sweet strawberry, 2.5ml CAP vanilla custard, 1ml CAP graham cracker and 1ml sucralose sweetener. This is a spot on recipe in my opinion and captures the proper sweetness and balance. The only thing that sucks is it really needs almost a week to steep. Protip I found is during the summer, place your bottles on the dashboard of a hot car for a hour or 2,speeds up the process quite nice and you don't have to bother with a crock pot or anything like that.