The Blue Garden Cocktail

The Blue Garden - original artwork by the Cocktail Artist
For many years we only planted blue and purple flowers in our garden (with the exception of some of our azaleas). It's so nice to look out at that cool color palette during the heat of the summer. Blues are also a good palette for summer watercolor paintings, and this post includes a few of the blue floral watercolors we have done during the past several summers.

There is no shortage of blue flower paintings done by great masters. Take a look at Irises, Van Gogh, 1889 (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles) and Monet's Water Lilies, 1914 - 1926 (MoMA, New York). In the description of Monet's 3-panel oil painting, the Museum of Modern Art says that Monet was trying to create "the refuge of a peaceful meditation in the center of a flowering aquarium." That's exactly the atmosphere we are looking for on a hot and muggy summer day. Just to be clear, we are in no way comparing our artwork with these masterpieces. It's more about the idea that blue is somehow both calming and refreshing - nice qualities in art and in a cocktail.

Our Blue Garden Cocktail uses two floral liqueurs - St. Germain and Creme de Violette, the later giving the drink it's slightly purple/blue hue. Creme de violette is also used in the classic Aviation Cocktail. After purchasing both Rothman & Winter's Creme de Violette (which has an indigo hue) and a bottle of Creme Yvette (which leans more pink than purple) to get just the right color for our Aviation, we had quite a surplus of this liqueur. Obviously, we are looking for new ways to use it. And yes, we are obsessive enough to purchase two different bottles of the same kind of (rather obscure) liqueur to get the color of a cocktail just right!

St. Germain, the other floral liqueur in this cocktail, is made from elderflowers gathered in the French Alps each spring. It has a wonderful fresh taste and no preservatives, so you shouldn't keep this on the shelf for too long. We've added white cranberry juice and lime to our vodka-based cocktail to balance the sweetness of the floral liqueurs.

We can't claim our cocktail is a great work of art, but we do find it calming and refreshing - especially when sipped in the garden while admiring (or painting) blue flowers. Cheers!

The Blue Garden Cocktail

Blue Garden Cocktail

2 ounces vodka
3/4 ounce St. Germain
1/2 ounce Creme de Violette
3/4 ounce fresh squeezed lime juice
1 ounce white cranberry juice

Shake all ingredients with ice cubes in a cocktail shaker and strain into a chilled cocktail coupe. Garnish with an edible flower (such as a purple pansy) or with a sage leaf.

The ingredients for the Blue Garden Cocktail with hydrangea from our garden.
Don't use hydrangea as garnish - it's not an edible flower.



Blue Flower watercolor sketch by the Cocktail Artist


Petunias and the Garden Wall - watercolor by the Cocktail Artist


Blue Pansies - watercolor by the Cocktail Artist

Popular posts from this blog

The Last Call

Image
This post is a week late, but this blog is our hobby (not our real job) so we’re not going to worry about it. Anyhow, we came up with this drink for Mardi Gras as the “last call” before the beginning of Lent – a time when some of us stop drinking for 40 days (we’ll let you know how that works out). The name “Last Call” also references the classic “Last Word” cocktail. The Last Word is really a perfect cocktail. It’s equal parts of four ingredients (gin, Green Chartreuse, Maraschino Liqueur, and lime) and a superb balance of tart, herbal, and sweet. It’s one of our fallback cocktails – one that we mix up when we can’t make up our mind about what we want to drink.  Another classic that we regularly enjoy is the Aviation Cocktail. The Aviation is another gin cocktail and is one of the few that uses Crème de Violette – a sweet, floral liqueur that is typically a deep purple hue. It takes mixing quite a few Aviations to go through a bottle of Crème de Violette, so it’s prob...
Read more

Lemon Bergamot Gimlet

Image
In case you don’t know us personally, or haven’t read the bio on our blog , you may not realize the “The Cocktail Artist” is really a partnership between two architects (who also happen to be married to each other). One of us comes up with the recipes, does the photography, and writes the blog posts – the other one creates all of the original artwork and offers opinions on the cocktail recipes. Being architects, we sometimes let our design-sense get the better of us – meaning we have been known to purchase a bottle of booze because we like the design of the bottle.  Occasionally this backfires, but rest assured (with some creative mixology or a bit of barrel-aging) we have always been able to make use of the contents of those impulse-buy bottles. Right now, two of the most attractive bottles in our liquor cabinet contain Italian spirits – Malfy Gin Con Limone and Italicus . Italy has always been a design trendsetter, so it’s not surprising that these bottles stand out...
Read more

Amalfi Martini

Image
Darn! Why didn’t we buy those airline tickets to Italy when they were cheap? It would be so nice to be lounging in a beautiful Italian seaside town right now.  The Amalfi region, on Italy's west coast, is known for it's production of lemon liqueur and fine writing and art paper - sounds like the perfect place for us! Oh well, maybe it would be better to be there during the off season. Italy is probably packed with American tourists right now. Let's  just pull out the watercolor paints and the cocktail shaker and bring a bit of la dolce vita  to our patio. Our Amalfi Martini (naturally) features limoncello. It's a fairly low-alcohol liqueur, so we boost the proof of this cocktail by adding our vodka of choice - District Made Vodka by One Eight Distilling. If you are using a vodka that doesn't have much flavor on it's own (which, honestly, is most vodka) you may want to add a couple dashes of citrus bitters to this recipe. This just wouldn't be an Ita...
Read more

Cherry Capital Old Fashioned

Image
Cherry Capital Old Fashioned - original watercolor painting by The Cocktail Artist If you've read some of our previous posts (such as the Up North Raspberry and Rye or the Grand Mariner Cocktail) you know that we're fans of the bourbon and rye produced by The Traverse City Whiskey Co . Traverse City, Michigan is known as the "Cherry Capital" for being the area with the largest production of tart cherries in the United States. In Traverse City, you will find wonderful freshwater beaches, lots of summer tourists, and (of course) cherries! You can attend the Cherry Festival in July, go to the Cherryland Mall, and fly into Cherry Capital airport. So the folks at Traverse City Whiskey (naturally) produce an American Cherry Edition of their bourbon. Here in the Nation's Capital we were lucky enough to find this cherry bourbon at our local liquor store. It's a nice bourbon for sipping neat, but during #OldFashionedOctober we also tried it in an Old Fashioned and...
Read more

Douglas Fir Martini

Image
This was one of our very early blog posts. Now that the holiday season is here it seems like a good time to revisit it. Our cocktail recipe remains unchanged, but we wanted to add some information about the ingredients and include a bit more artwork. This martini, with it’s pine forest aroma, is our antidote to holiday stress. Mix up a couple of these to help you through your decorating, gift-wrapping, etc… Doesn’t enjoying a cocktail while you relax in front of the fireplace sound much nicer than struggling to get the Christmas tree in the stand? Along with The Cocktail  Artist's watercolors maybe we can give you the feeling you're walking through a pine forest instead of stressing out over some holiday preparations. At the heart of this cocktail is Clear Creek Distillery’s Douglas Fir Brandy . We discovered this unusual liqueur in our local liquor store a couple of years ago and just couldn’t resist giving it a try. Clear Creek calls it “a tree in a bottle”. It's m...
Read more