MxMo LVII: Flores de Mayo

[ UPDATE: The round-up post is up – here. ]

I’m quite grateful to Paul Clarke at Cocktail Chronicles  for being able to host this month’s Mixology Monday.   Lately, the monthly incentive of MxMo has been the one thing helping me keep the site updated.  Probably like many folks who decided to “start a blog”, after the rush of initial postings, it gets quite difficult to maintain a consistent pace of writing.  Its almost like…shudder…work.  How Erik at Underhill Lounge  or Frederic at Cocktail Virgin Slut manage daily postings is completely beyond me and my liver.  Maybe they are cyborgs.  Or half-alien.  (And yes, I clearly read too many comic books as a kid.)

This month’s round robin will occur on Monday, May 16th with the theme of  Flores de Mayo – Floral Cocktails.  For most of us, turning the page on the calendar from April to May means finally getting to say goodbye to the weeks on end of cold, gray drizzle that followed a winter of endless snow, or in the case of us on on the Pacific Rim, winter of endless rains. (Unless you are living up the glam life in LA or beach bumming in the O.C., in which case I hope you are enjoying that endless SUNSHINE. Grrr.)  As the sun starts becoming more frequent and the temptation to play hooky mid-week gets stronger,  nothing brightens the day better this time of year than the fresh blossoms hanging from the trees on the street and popping up in your neighborhood gardens.   Goodbye cabin fever, hello springtime!

The challenge is to feature a cocktail that highlights a floral flavor profile or includes a floral derived ingredient, whether home-made or off the shelf.  With the ever expanding catalogue of spirits (and the kitchen labs of home enthusiasts), there’s a whole host of directions for you to choose from – elderflower liqueur, creme de violette, chamomile infused gin, hibiscus grenadine, rosewater, lavender syrup – or to create.   With some luck, one of the garnish gurus will figure out a way to turn an orchid into a swizzle stick.

So if you want to join the virtual bar crawl, shoot me an email that includes a link to your blog entry for your drink to barmancometh (at) hotmail dot com, or post a comment to this entry by midnight on May 16th that includes the same.  Also, please link back to the Mixology Monday website and include the MxMo logo.  If you don’t have your own blog, I can feature you here with a guest blog post, but I will need to receive your submission by May 14th.  I will post a round-up of everyone’s cocktails within a few days after, post haste.

Kampai!