cocktail inspiration by

RISA WEAVER-ENION

Laurel Bay Leaf (Lauris nobilis) is the more commonly seen type, but there’s also Indian Bay Leaf (Cinnamomum tamala), which is the leaf of the cinnamon tree. Laurel bay leaf is more common in Italian cooking and has a bit of pine and lemon in its scent. The Indian bay leaf is, perhaps not surprisingly, used in Indian cooking, and has a fragrance of cinnamon and cloves.

I originally created this recipe for a bourbon that had been finished in Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon barrels, which imparted a hint of (Laurel) bay leaf to the bourbon. So I garnished it with a whole bay leaf and cinnamon stick, to play off the cinnamon syrup. But when I discovered that there’s such a thing as Indian bay leaves, and that they smell like cinnamon, I realized they would make an even better garnish than the Laurel bay leaf.

The selection of Indian bay leaves I received from Selefina had a wide variety of sizes. One of them was at least six inches long! I don’t recommend using one that big for a cocktail garnish. Fortunately, they also come in more reasonable, garnish-appropriate sizes.

You can garnish by placing the bay leaf and cinnamon stick on top of the ice cube, but it’s a little easier to drink if you place them down inside the drink. Just don’t eat the bay leaf. Not that you would.

Crème de cassis is blackcurrant liqueur. It’s deeply flavorful, quite rich in taste, and super dark in color. A little goes a long way, much like maraschino liqueur. I kept the quantities of each ingredient fairly low so together they didn’t overwhelm the bourbon.

This drink works well either before dinner or after. It’s only about 2 ½ ounces in volume after stirring with ice to dilute, so it’s a relaxing little sipper. And if you’re wondering about the name, the original bourbon I used is called Athenaeum, which is derived from the Greek goddess of wisdom, Athena, and is “a building or room where books, periodicals, and newspapers are kept for use.” So...a library, lol. I imagined myself sipping this in a wood-paneled library while reading a classic novel. Not that I have a wood-paneled library, mind you. But one can dream.

You actually do need to be a Star Wars fan to get the reference I make in the name of this drink. Han Solo (Harrison Ford’s character) is a spaceship pilot/smuggler. One of the items he smuggles is glitterstim spice, which is mined on a moon of the planet Kessel. It happens to be quite close to a cluster of black holes, making the route in and out of Kessel rather treacherous.

When Han Solo first meets Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi (who are trying to hire him to fly them off of Tatooine), he brags that his ship is the one that “made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs.” As an homage to both the glitterstim spice and the Kessel Run, I created this recipe.

[Selefina editorial: If you're old enough to mix this drink, you're old enough to know #HanShotFirst]

Rye whiskey is known for its spicy flavor profile. While bourbon is rather sweet because of its high corn content (at least 51% of the mashbill is required to be corn), rye whiskey is spicy because at least 51% of its mashbill must be rye. Since I was trying to design a cocktail to honor a made-up spice, rye whiskey was an obvious choice for the base spirit.

I modeled this recipe on a classic Old-Fashioned template, so I needed to get some bitters and some sweetness in there. Allspice dram is a liqueur made from a base of rum, with cinnamon sticks, allspice berries, and sugar added during the infusion process. It’s one of my favorite liqueurs, and I’ll take any excuse to use it.

Ginger liqueur was another way to get even more spice into the mix. I didn’t want the cocktail to be too sweet, so I took the typical half-ounce of simple syrup from an Old-Fashioned and split it evenly between the allspice dram and the ginger liqueur.

I wanted to keep the Angostura bitters in the recipe, but I also added cardamom bitters to get yet another spice in there. The brand I used is The Bitter Housewife out of Portland, OR.

Selefina’s Crystallized Ginger Root makes the perfect garnish for this drink! Not only does the garnish reference the ginger liqueur in the recipe, but it also makes a tasty snack when you finish your drink. I like to place the crystallized ginger down into the cocktail as I sip it, and then it’s soaked in whiskey by the time you finish your drink.

The crystallized ginger is nicely pliable, so it’s easy to run a cocktail pick through it. You also could do without the cocktail pick and just toss a piece of crystallized ginger right into the glass.

Let’s back up to the beginning. When I saw this new product on the Selefina website, I immediately wanted to use it on top of a foamy drink. Because National Espresso Martini Day is March 15, it seemed like a good choice, and coffee and chocolate are great together.

If you’ve ever had a freshly made espresso at a coffee shop (or at home), you know there’s a foamy top layer called the crema. It’s formed by microbubbles of carbon dioxide that attach to the oils and fats in coffee and rise to the top. When you make an espresso martini, you lose some of the crema effect due to the temperature change, but there’s still usually a layer of foam.

The traditional garnish for an espresso martini is three coffee beans on top of the crema. In order for the black cacao garnish to fit in better, I used an espresso martini recipe that includes some chocolate bitters. There are quite a few variations on the espresso martini recipe, but this one comes from the book Homemade Happy Hour by Katy McAvoy.

Admittedly, making espresso martinis at home is best done with access to a fancy espresso machine, but if you don’t have one of those, you can use a stove-top Moka Pot or cold brew coffee. (Note that cold brew coffee may not give you the foamy crema.) You also can go buy an espresso at a coffee shop if there’s one nearby. You want the espresso to be cold before using it in the cocktail, so it won’t matter if you have to carry it home first.

[Uses a recipe from book "Homemade Happy Hour" by Katy McAvoy. Check out @katymcavoy for more inspiration.]

Some tips for using the black cacao powder as a garnish:

• It doesn’t come packaged with a shaker cap, so I transferred it to a (rather old) metal shaking tin.
• Be sure to get your stencil as close as possible to the surface of the drink. The further the powder has to fall, the more opportunity it has for dispersing outside the boundary of the stencil.
• Use a small stencil pattern! This is where I went wrong, lol. (You could skip the stencil altogether and just sprinkle a little bit of black cacao on top.)
• Don’t get carried away with the cacao garnish. A light dusting will do just fine. On my second attempt at the garnish, I used even more powder than the first time, and by the time I finished photographing the drink, it was basically bubbling like black lava! It was funny, but not quite what I was going for.

Guajillo chiles are not really spicy, rating a “mild to medium” on the Scoville scale. I find that they add a little bit of earthy smokiness when I use them in cocktails. Not like campfire smoke though, more like the subtle smoke in a mole sauce.

The advantage of a guajillo-sea salt rim is that you get not only the salty taste as you sip the drink, but also a nice aroma from the guajillo each time you raise the glass to your mouth. Eating and drinking are as much about aroma as taste, and the guajillo adds a level of complexity that regular salt cannot achieve.

And because the guajillo powder is a deep red, you get a nice pink salt mixture after combining it with the white sea salt. This adds visual interest to your drink, which is also important! We eat and drink with our eyes before anything gets to our stomachs.

Before mixing your drink, you’ll want to prepare your glass with the salted rim. First, cut a lime in half through the long end, then cut each half in half again so you end up with four wedges. Slice a diagonal slit across one of the wedges—this is the wedge you’ll use to wet the rim of your glass.

Pour a small amount of fleur de sel into a small bowl. I find that a set of glass Pyrex prep bowls is super useful for this sort of thing. Add as much guajillo chile powder to the salt as you like, then stir to combine. Sprinkle the mixture onto a small plate so that it forms a pile in a line.

Tuck the rim of a rocks glass into the lime wedge with the slit and rotate it around so that about half the rim is covered in lime juice. Dip the wet rim into your pile of guajillo-sea salt mixture and gently dab it while rotating until the rim is well salted. Set the glass aside while you prepare the rest of the recipe.

I like to salt only a portion of the rim because not everyone wants salt with every sip of their margarita. When preparing drinks only for yourself, you can do whatever you want. But if you’re preparing drinks for friends or family (or strangers!) it’s nice to give people some flexibility.

One last tip: the fleur de sel is fairly large grains of salt. If you prefer smaller grains, and if you have a mortar and pestle (or a spice and coffee grinder), you can feel free to crush or grind the sea salt to a finer texture before combining it with the guajillo powder, which is very fine.

A twist of orange peel is the traditional garnish for many classic cocktails. Studding the orange peel with whole cloves is an easy way to up-level a twist, so that was the jumping off point for the rest of this recipe. With cloves in the garnish, I wanted to work them into the recipe as well. I decided to make a clove simple syrup, but then at the last minute, I tossed in a whole cinnamon stick too, because clove & cinnamon are a match made in heaven.

Once I had the cinnamon-clove syrup, I started to think about a base spirit. The Old-Fashioned template is one of my favorites to play with. It’s mostly spirit, with a bit of sweetness and a bit of bitterness. It’s usually made with whiskey, but you can swap out that base spirit for any other aged spirit and have yourself a totally different drink.

Cinnamon and clove both go well with rum, so I split the base between two rums, one from Hawai’i and one from Jamaica. Gold rum has a bit more body and flavor than white rum, and the Smith & Cross Jamaica pot still rum has a distinctive aroma and “funk” to it, which is why it’s used in a smaller quantity.

I wanted the orange to be present in the drink itself, and not just in the garnish, so I added a bit of orange liqueur. Then I decided to bring some banana liqueur to the mix to amp up the tropical feeling of the whole thing. Mole bitters completed the picture, further adding some warmth and spice.

This garnish may look fancy, but it’s fairly easy to make. First, peel a long, wide strip of orange peel using a Y-peeler (or vegetable peeler). Trim all four sides of the orange peel with a sharp knife to create straight edges in the shape of a parallelogram. Poke the sharp end of a clove into the orange peel at intervals. Don’t place the cloves too close together, or you won’t be able to twist the orange peel. I find that 4-5 cloves is usually the right number, but it depends on how long your orange peel strip is. Wrap the clove-studded orange peel around a whole cinnamon stick and balance it on top of the ice cube in your cocktail.