|| Elderflower, Rum, Eggwhite Sour ||
This origin story is pretty straightforward. I was throwing a small cocktail party for a couple of friends. In a small company I always enjoy when people ask me for a specific flavour pairing and I go and try to whip something up. Sometimes it really works and it’s great to see the delighted surprise in peoples’ faces!
This was such a case. I got a request for “an elderflower eggwhite sour”. The lady in question is really into elderflower and I’d been making various eggwhite sours that evening that were well received. For this request I could take my time. Firstly, elderflower liqueur (I’m using St. Germain) is of course really tasty and pretty easy to work with, but it doesn’t stand up well on its own in my experience. However I still want the drink to be predominantly elderflower, as per request!
So we’re looking for other flavours that are close to elderflower, which leads us straight to various types of stone fruit. This may be surprising, because elderflower is not a fruit, let alone a stone, but I’ve been successfully using elderflower for a while now whenever I want the stone fruit flavour without too much fruitiness.
For the base, gin would have been obvious, so I skipped that and decided to go for rum because I don’t have a lot of eggwhite rum sours yet, and the requestor of this drink does like her rum. And the fun thing with rum is of course you can experiment with different mixes of them.
To tie the base and the elderflower and the stone fruit together, the traditional tiki / caribbean spices should do the job I figured (vanilla and falernum), and for a bit of contrast to make it all pop my books told me orange should work (curacao and bitters).
Here is the recipe:
- 15 ml Aged Rum
- 15 ml Black Rum
- 22.5 ml Elderflower liqueur
- 7.5 ml Velvet Falernum
- 7.5 ml Vanilla syrup
- 1 tsp Blue Curacao
- 1 tsp Apricot brandy
- 1 tsp Peach liqueur
- 15 ml lemon juice
- 1 ds Orange bitters
- eggwhite
Simply combine all ingredients, then dry shake first (because it’s an eggwhite sour), then add ice, shake and double strain into a pretty glass. Garnish with one or two nice flower. Note the lemon juice! You would expect lime juice in a rum cocktail, but I accidentally made a couple with lime juice and I was really stumped for a while why it didn’t achieve the brightness of the first try. Turns out it was the lime. Don’t even think of using lime here. The tartness ruins the delicate flavours.
This was one of those magical times you get it first time right! I tried it later with fewer ingredients (because let’s face it, this is a bit complicated), and it really lost most of its excitingness.
My theory for this is that by combining many flavours that were close together, I achieved some sort of “broader base” which helps these gentle flavours seem more intense without becoming overly sweet or boring.
For the rums I used Angostura 7 (a lightly aged blended Spanish style) and Gosling Black Seal. But you can definitely play around with this. I’ve also had success with Ango 7, Appleton Signature (Jamaican) and a splash of Plantation OFTD (dark overproof), for a little bit more present rumminess.
Perhaps best of all, the colour of this cocktail is a lovely light green! This may (and probably should) surprise you, because blue (from the curacao) and red (from the peach) should make purple according to what you learned in kindergarten. However, the red and blue both are still transmitting some middle spectrum yellow and green, and combining them cancels out the outside of the spectrum, leaving only that middle. That is my theory anyway.
The colour was a little bit of a surprise for me too, but also a gift, because with the green drink and the white foamy head, it really resembles the elderflower so the name deserves to be The Blossom! Obviously we garnish with some flowers.
Dall-E’s impression of this drink is pretty close to the real thing, and much pretties than the photos I can take with my phone at home:
