Cocktailian Nerdiness: The Battle Royale

And now to find something to do with my blackberry liqueur. One thing I’ve found out is that, like many other sweet liqueurs, it doesn’t go well with gin–at least not by itself. I have a suspicion it would work well with lemon, but that’s a project for another day. Currently…BEHOLD!

Battle Royale

1/4 oz St. Germain Elderflower Liqueur
3/4 oz blackberry liqueur
Champagne

Build in a champagne flute or saucer. Pour the liqueurs in first, then top with chilled champagne.

This is a variation on the Kir Royale, which is more or less the same thing but with no St. Germain and creme de cassis, which is blackcurrent-flavored, in place of the blackberry liqueur. The blackberry liqueur’s sweetness is tempered by the lightness of the champagne, and the elderflower liqueur gives it depth and delicacy of flavor. I had this with breakfast, but it’s probably better as a dessert cocktail or with fruit and cheese.

(I had intended this to have a gaming-related name, to commemorate the passing of my current gaming site, but instead I guess it’s film/manga-themed, after the Battle Royale franchise concerning schoolchildren battling to the death as part of a game show. This would later be weirdly echoed in the American Hunger Games series. I guess it’s a fairly common theme.)

Blackberry Liqueur

I’m back on liqueurs, and this time it’s blackberry, in honor of my first time playing Kinectimals (with a black panther.) Kinectimals is just the latest in a line of things convincing me that today’s pinups aren’t people but kittens–it’s like a virtual petting zoo for the cat-deprived among us. It’s cutesy William Gibson or something–a consensual hallucination involving baby tigers instead of sixteen-year-old models in French orbital fatigues.

On to the liqueur. I used this basic recipe, increasing the sugar to three cups as I had seen in some other recipes. “Cheapest vodka available” didn’t seem like the best idea, but I did get the slightly harsher-tasting Smirnoff instead of anything more expensive. I also eschewed the cheesecloth (as I don’t have any) for a fine strainer, which seemed to work pretty well at getting the mushy bits out. I’m still looking for something to do with the vodka-soaked blackberries. Garnish? Jam?

If I were going to make this again, I think I’d try either cutting down on the vodka or increasing the water; it feels a little sharp right now, which obscures the rich taste of the blackberries. I’d also consider making it with grain alcohol instead of vodka, which I think would cut down on the soaking time and give it a cleaner taste (since I could use filtered water), but overall I’m happy with how this turned out. Now I just have to try it in a drink–I’ve got an idea, but haven’t tested it yet.

Like a Negroni, but not

You know what I’ll have to come up with a name for someday?

1 oz. gin
1 oz. Campari
1/2 oz. creme de violette

Unlike the Negroni, it’s summer-sweet, not winter-sweet. A silk scarf instead of a fur coat.

Too much creme de violette?

Never. No such thing.

Lillet Marshmallows and the Popularity of Fanfiction

I made Lillet marshmallows. I’ve grown to understand that in order to become interested in anything, I have to trick my inner sixteen-year-old into an interest. This is simpler than it sounds: My inner sixteen-year-old enjoys almost anything with the air of the forbidden, impossible, or sophisticated around it: the future, martinis, gadgets, and flouting social norms.

Recontextualization and spectacle is the spoonful of sugar for the medicine of high culture, serious literature, and real work.

This isn’t unique to me, is my understanding. I was looking at a series of photographs of Dubai, the gimmick of which was that they were shopped with Star Wars characters. They’re good photographs–especially if you’re an aficionado of the particular kind of damaged-urban-landscape documentation that leads me to browsing Urban Atrophy for hours on end. The Star Wars really doesn’t do anything for them–it’s not particularly illuminating to either Lucas or Dubai, and a fair number of the pieces look like cheap ‘shops, sub-Photoshop Phriday stuff. But, then, I probably wouldn’t have been looking at them if it weren’t for the Star Wars tie-in.

It’s the kind of thing that leads aspiring novelists to hate fanfic writers, who garner hundreds of fans by writing long, rambling embellishments on the established canon. The problem, of course, is that it’s a double-edged sword: When you write fanfiction you’re giving up on most forms of publishing, and, often, mainstream legitimacy; there’s a huge market for fanfiction of all kinds, but that market is still dependent on an established position subordinate to the canon original.

And so it goes for a lot of things, really–like writing within an established genre, whether it’s “original fanfiction” or just piggybacking on “Dragons! I love dragons!”, Japanophilia, etc. Or the “postmodern spectacle” hook–the fact that I’ll read anything as long as I can pretend what I’m really reading about is the apocalypse (I’m looking at you, Cormac McCarthy.) That’s the gift and the curse of slipstream culture, which gives me Naked Lunch as the inspiration for Neuromancer, but leaves me with the nagging fear that all I’m really doing is bringing “real culture” down, and enjoying a Keats poem only because it’s being read by a girl with giant hair and they had to push the X button at the end of each stanza.