It’s time for a wave of holiday parties, during which copious volumes of eggnog and holiday-themed cocktails will undoubtedly be poured.

If you want your shindig to stand out, you should ditch that traditional booze, morph yourself into a cocktail alchemist and one-up your friends and coworkers with science.

How? By cooking up WIRED's special holiday drink, the Ouya.

The Ouya isn’t your standard liquid cocktail. It’s served as liquid-filled beads formed using a technique known as reverse spherification, a fancy term for turning liquids or liquefied foods into gel-covered, liquid-filled spheres that pop in your mouth.

Reverse spherification exploits a chemical reaction between calcium ions and alginate, a polysaccharide abundant in the cell walls of brown algae. In the presence of calcium ions, alginate molecules cross-link with each other to form a gel. In the kitchen, chefs learned that if they added calcium to liquids or pureed foods and then poured droplets of their concoctions into an alginate solution, the alginate would react with calcium ions on the surface of the droplets to form a thin gel skin that would morph the droplets into what looked like solid beads. The inside, however, would remain liquid. (It's called reverse spherification because originally alginate was added to the liquefied food and then droplets were dropped into a calcium solution.)

With a little chemistry, you can turn an ordinary cocktail into delicious gel shots. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

"[Spherification] plays on people's expectations. That's what the whole drama of the dish is," says chemist-turned-chef Chris Young of ChefSteps, the online culinary community that crafted the Ouya for WIRED.

To surprise your guests with this bar magic yourself, you’ll need a blender, a scale, bowls, a slotted spoon, a silicon spherical mold tray, some standard bar fare – tequila, Campari, fresh lime juice, water – and some less conventional items like calcium lactate gluconate, xantham gum and alginate. You can buy all these ingredients separately or use a spherification kit from ChefSteps, like the one WIRED.com Editor Mark McClusky used to make the Ouya for staff on a recent Friday afternoon.

To embark on your own WIRED spherified cocktail adventure follow these easy steps:

1. Start off by blending 30 grams of tequila, 18 grams of Campari, 9.5 g of lime juice and 35 grams of water together. Then blend in 1.8 grams ofxantham gum, a thickening agent, and 0.15 grams of calcium lactate gluconate, which is your source of calcium for the spherification process.

2. Pour this mixture into the silicon spherical mold tray, cover it and stick it in the freezer until the hemispheres are completely frozen. Spherification can be done without freezing, but because the alcoholic Ouya mixture has a lower density than the alginate solution, the liquid droplets don’t fully submerge in the alginate solution and you end up with messy gooey Ouya strands instead of plump, round orange spheres. (We learned this the hard way.)

The frozen Ouya concoction before its spherification. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

3. While the Ouya balls freeze, prepare a 0.5 percent alginate bath by pouring a liter of cold distilled water into a blender. Measure out exactly 5.0 grams of sodium alginate. Start the blender and slowly add in the sodium alginate. Keep blending until the solution is homogenous. Let it sit for about an hour to let the alginate hydrate and the air bubbles escape.

4. Pour distilled water into two medium sized bowls. You'll use these to rinse the alginate off your Ouya beads once they've spherified.

5. Heat the alginate solution to about 50 degrees Celsius on a stove or microwave.

The Ouya beads are ready to be served. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

6. Remove the frozen Ouya hemispheres from the mold and drop them, one by one, into the alginate solution. Shake them around gently for 30 seconds and then lift them gently with a slotted spoon.

7. Rinse the spheres in the distilled water baths and then place them in shot glasses.

8. Shoot back the spheres and ready yourself for a delightful Ouya explosion in your mouth.