Sunny Delicious, Orangina, Orange Creamsicle, Orange Julius…It goes on and on. So much damn orange. So interesting. It’s been firmly ingrained within our subconscious. Everything orange is the best, except for cocktails. In cocktails, orange juice is the absolute worst. Flabby is the word that comes to mind. It’s neither acidic or really that sweet, the sherbet it makes is only so-so but despite this we all gravitate toward it. Chef and I were talking about Orange Julius just the other day and the wheels started spinning in my head. Ah yes, every couple of years the delusion of an orange creamsicle/Orange Julius cocktail. The bug hit me again last night. I can do it, I told myself. Like going back to an old lover I said, this time, things will be different. I’m a different man now, more experienced, more mature…

If I had time I might be able to write a truly stellar New Yorker style article on the orange, it’s origins, cultivation, the rise and fall of Orange Julius, etc. but I’ve got about an hour this morning to hack this post out, not three months.

All bars have tons of orange juice kicking around because we use the peels for the oils and the orange juice is the byproduct. It finds its way into cocktails for this reason and this reason only. I juiced some just yesterday and made a creamsicle soda for staff drink that was quite quaffable. This is how the whole damn creamsicle drink came back into my head.

I turned to Google a bit here to check out drinks specs. Let’s begin:

This one is from Sula and Spice. I’d love to figure out how they did the bullet point thing…

Try this adult version of the ice cream treat we all love!

Ingredients

• 1 cup orange juice
• 3 oz whipped vodka
• 2 oz milk
• .75 oz orange liqueur

Looks pretty good actually, but vodka? No way.

Let’s check out another from Cadry’s Kitchen:

Ingredients

• ▢¾ cup orange juice preferably freshly squeezed, about two oranges worth
• ▢1 shot gin or vodka
• ▢1 or 2 ice cubes
• ▢1 Tablespoon sweetened vanilla almond milk or your preferred non-dairy milk

Instructions

• ▢Pour orange juice into a short glass.
• ▢Add a shot of gin and stir.
• ▢Put ice into the glass.
• ▢Finish with a Tablespoon of vanilla almond milk on top. Don’t stir, so that the almond milk stands out in the glass.

Notes

Since orange juice is the main ingredient here, freshly squeezed orange juice is highly recommended.

For a stronger vanilla flavor, add an additional Tablespoon of vanilla almond milk. Or use vanilla vodka instead of gin.

Ok, Cadry, I like your style. We’ve got some gin here. Her presentation is very Rustic Canyon with the rocks glass, yada, yada. Almond milk works but it makes me wonder how this would go together with some almond amazake syrup. Hmm.

Let’s see what the “professional” writers on Punch say about the orange creamsicle cocktail.

Well, this is cool as all hell. Bar Shinji, in New York has a cocktail called the Tropicana which is served inside a hollowed out orange.

Whoa, yeah, I’m not doing that anytime soon. The article says it took these guys 18 months to perfect. Read about it here.

This is some advanced stuff that goes right over my head. Just read this:

The cocktail inside the orange vessel is equally complex. The base is a housemade orange liqueur blending Haku vodka, Grand Marnier, orange peels and dextrose (an artificial sweetener commonly used in foods), which gets added to a bag and macerated with slices of orange under a vacuum. The technique, known as vacuum maceration, uses the change in atmospheric pressure to boil the liquid at room temperature, retaining the integrity of the ingredients to get the flavor of the fruit without overdiluting the liqueur. He uses the same method to combine Toki whisky, tropical mangoes and glucose into an ingredient that adds structure to the drink, lending a mouthfeel that he says mimics that of orange pulp.

I had no idea vacuum maceration was even a thing. Now I really want to try this to see how it tastes after all of their fancy techniques.

I did a google search to see how much they charge for this puppy and then ended up on one of those weird list websites because I clicked on a picture of Giada Delaurentis with the caption “The Biggest Scandals to Ever Hit the Food Network.” Of course, it sent me right to a picture of Bobby Flay. Yeah, this guy was stealing tips from servers way back in the day. Nothing new here. Oh wait, there’s some juicy stuff in there. Bobby and Giada in Italy, there was a show that may have taken them both down a different path in life. Ha. Remember watching all the great Food Network shows? Molto Mario, Emeril, the guy, Andrew Zimmerman, that ate all the weird stuff, Iron Chef, all that crap? Loved it.

Anyway…Where were we? Oh yeah, the orange creamsicle cocktail. Maybe we can call it Gossip Queen? There you go. So, there’s a few things involved here and reasons why the orange creamsicle cocktail never truly took off. One of them being that any cream in a drink will break if you add lemon or lime. That’s an easy enough fix though, you can just use whey. What else? Well, vanilla. Easy enough. What about the orange component? Orange Julius used orange concentrate if I remember correctly. Also a whole raw egg, milk, and lots of ice. I think that’s it. That’s the old school method. They don’t put raw egg in there anymore because people are squeamish about it.

I thought Orange Julius had gone out of business but there’s still some locations kicking around. There’s one here in Valencia which is sort of apropos. I’ve got this on the brain right now and it figures that I’m thinking about it now that citrus season is long over. But hey, there’s always lots of orange juice…