Sparkling raspberry lemonade

I wanted to have a red drink for the 4th of July, and I wanted to be able to at least halfway fill our lovely glass beverage dispenser (it's so big that we never have a reason to use it). I found a couple of old-school, made from scratch raspberry lemonade recipes, but I had so many other things to do on Saturday that I didn't fancy squeezing two cups of lemon juice as well. So I compromised with the following idea: make the raspberry sauce and freeze it a few days ahead of time and combine it with lemonade from concentrate on the day of the party. This was absolutely the way to go. I made a double batch, and this is reflected in the ingredients below.

INGREDIENTS

2 (12 oz) packages of frozen raspberries (about 6 cups)
2 C sugar
1 C water
3 T grated lemon peel
2 cans of lemonade concentrate, such as Minute Maid
2 1-liter bottles (33.8 ounces each) chilled sparkling water or club soda
Ice cubes
Fresh raspberries (optional)
Lemon slices

DIRECTIONS

Combine frozen raspberries, sugar, and 1 cup water in medium saucepan. Stir over medium heat until sugar dissolves and berries thaw. Increase heat and boil 3 minutes.

I let this cool for about 30 minutes. Strain raspberry mixture into a bowl, pressing on solids to extract as much liquid as possible; discard solids in strainer. Mix lemon peel into the raspberry syrup. After this cooled completely, I poured it into a Ziploc freezer bag and froze it, thawing it on the day of the party.

In a large bowl, make the lemonade according to the instructions on the can. It's usually something like add 4.3 cans of water to each can of concentrate. Mix in the thawed raspberry syrup. Pour into a large pitcher and float some lemon slices in the bright red lemonade.

To serve, fill a glass with an ample amount of ice, pour in the lemonade, and top it off with just a splash of sparkling water and a lemon slice. Drop some fresh raspberries in there too, if you like. I knew we'd have some leftovers, so I didn't want to flood the lemonade with sparkling water and watch it become flat. Keeping the two separated was the right thing to do, and it also lets you control how much sparkle each glass will have (some people want more than others).