After today, I need a drink!
It was a whirlwind day to get a unseasonably large order out by 4 PM. Thankfully, we made it in just the nick of time! Unfortunately, my adrenaline is still pumping from the chaos and making it hard to write today. If this is a preview of the holiday rush ahead, I’d better step up my drinking and start writing in advance!
The beauty of last night’s Mr. Boston’s recipe was only skin deep I’m afraid. While the Bird of Paradise was lovely to behold, it was rather boring to taste.
With ingredients of Gin, lemon juice, Grenadine and egg white; I figured this would be a nice fruity drink to end the day. After all, who doesn’t like a fruity drink?!
The poor citrus in our refrigerator looks as though a fruit loving Hannibal Lector has skinned them all alive. Every time I need to add a lemon peel garnish or squeeze the juice from an unsuspecting lime I think back to Seth Rogen’s Sausage Party, and feel a bit guilty – well, sort of 😉
Thankfully not a drop of citrus has been going to waste since starting our blog series. Even the fruit that has been squeezed goes into our soda stream bottle to add some zest to our sparkling water. Needless to say we had plenty of mangled, half used lemons to pick from to gather the 1/3 ounce needed for the Bird of Paradise.
After converting fractions to Jiggers we used this recipe for the cocktail:
-
1-1/8 ounces Gin
-
3/8 ounce lemon juice
-
3/8 teaspoon Grenadine
-
1 egg white
To our dismay the lemon juice took over the cocktail.
While I enjoy lemonade, the 3 dashes of Grenadine did little to sweeten the citrus bite. In fact, the Grenadine didn’t seem to add much at all other than help create a pink flamingo tinted drink. (The color was the best part, so I guess the Grenadine did a lot.)
After all the ingredients are thoroughly shaken over crushed ice (per the book instructions), the Bird of Paradise is said to be served in a 6 ounce Highball glass and filled with carbonated water.
Ryan’s master shaking technique yielded a substantial egg white foam and filled the glass before we could add the soda water. We decided to take the photo as is so that we didn’t cause a volcano. Then the most important part of tasting commenced before the water went in.
As I said before, the drink was rather underwhelming. I figured that adding water would only decrease the flavor further and I was right. The fizz of the sparkling H20 made the foam rise from the glass which was lovely but other than toning the lemon down, it didn’t save the drink. It was just plain blah.
In researching this cocktail I discovered 2 or 3 blogs that praised the Bird of Paradise as being one of their favorite Gin cocktails. I find that is really perplexing because neither of us enjoyed the Bird of Paradise we mixed up from the 1935 recipe. Goes to show taste is a subjective, mysterious thing. Perhaps I’ll try Jacques Straub’s Bird Cocktail instead. Curacao and Brandy sound more like paradise to me.