Blood Orange Martini

This Friday’s Happy Hour post continues my obsession with blood oranges in the form of a blood orange martini. Would you believe that I’m really almost at the end of doing all my blood orange recipes after I got the box of oranges from my friend in Arizona? I have blood oranges preserved in various ways. I have blood orange bitters infusing through next week. And I have a bag of frozen blood orange juice, which I’ve been using as ice cubes for cocktails, including for this blood orange martini.

I have a tendency to go way overboard with produce. I’ve had years where I’ve ended up going to a u-pick farm and coming home with thirty pounds of cucumbers or sixty pounds of tomatoes. My first year of u-pick, I picked just about every fruit that was available, and we had frozen berries and jams and pickles to last us nearly two years. I’ve been a bit more moderate this last year. I canned thirty pounds of tomatoes into spaghetti sauce. I didn’t bother with pickles, because we still have some. The good thing about being moderate is that by the time the blood oranges came into my life, I wasn’t overly exhausted from preserving all summer long.

One of the best things I did with the oranges was to make blood orangecello. I used the same basic technique I used for my limoncello. I used a veggie peeler to peel five blood oranges. When you do this, use just the outer peel, not the pith. I steeped the peels in vodka for four days in a quart jar (peels + enough vodka to fill the jar). I made a simple syrup of 3 1/2 cups water and 2 1/2 cups sugar. I strained out the peels from the vodka, combined it with the simple syrup and let that sit overnight. The infused vodka and simple syrup go in jars and get refrigerated and that’s that. The blood orangecello did not have an especially red hue to it - it looks like the limoncello. The taste, however, is akin to a good triple sec. It’s really lovely and especially lovely in this blood orange martini.

If you don’t have the time to make the blood orangecello, triple sec or cointreau will also work in this recipe.

The cubes there in the front are frozen blood orange juice. I used these when I made the blood orange martini, defrosting about four to get the juice. I also used these to chill the martini a bit more after I’d made it. The juice melts and doesn’t water down the cocktail.