We’ve been so busy this season that we regrettably didn’t share one of our other “passion projects” with you. This curation of topics business can be really hard, sometimes! We often have many things in flight and sometimes we prioritize what we think is important to you over what’s important to us.
If you were with us last season, you might recall our DIY project where we crafted the illustrious liqueur “Creme De Violette” from our home grown magenta colored Viola flowers. Well, to say that project was a success is an understatement, it made for same darn fine “one of a kind” Aviation cocktails! And we still have much left!
This territory isn’t exactly well trodden. There aren’t recipes or instructions you can follow, online or otherwise. We’re likely walking in other’s footsteps, but these things haven’t been written down for public display and reproduction. Yet, we know enough about preservation and food safety to carve our own path.
So, we took on a similar project this year. The aim was to produce a “never before seen” product, which we’ll affectionately call “Creme D’Orange” as homage to our OG experiment. The gist is we performed multiple infusions with a very lovely orange colored Viola flower we grew this season. Some of which we grew “in production” (for maximum growth) and the remainder that we harvested from our container flower beds.
We learned last season that we didn’t have to go “as hard” with the infusion process. The Viola flavors are more than captured by a few simple infusions, so we performed about four infusions with our flowers this season. We did struggle to capture the “deep orange” we’d intended with this viola species. We wanted to achieve a fluorescent “biohazard orange” akin to the natural flower. This is the way with untrodden paths, sometimes you don’t end up quite where you want.
But, this takes us to truly unexplored territory! Our intention is to navigate a home grown “orange liqueur,” the likes that aren’t normally produced. Our intention is to further infuse this infusion with dried orange flower blossoms, creating a complex floral and orange liqueur that simply has no modern equivalent!
After we fully create our desired steps of infusion, we’ll fully filter the liqueur through coffee filters and a pour over coffee maker. This will then be stored in a “pop top” bottle of some sort. This level of DIY liqueur is entirely new ground for crafted cocktails. We can look at orange liqueur and other florally flavored alcohols for inspiration, but whatever final cocktails we might craft with it are truly a new world.
What we’re doing here is fusing together multiple methods, all based in infusion based preservation. Making an orange liqueur from orange blossoms is certainly not unheard of. But, performing a multiple levels of natural infusions to achieve color, flavor and a desired design is the evolution of this skill for us.
We’re excited to take this project into the winter months. We may post again about this project, over the winter, as it’s something we’ve found quite enjoyable. Pioneering new paths in the world is both exciting and fulfilling, this is one of the many ways in which we try to contribute back to our readers.
