Orange Creamsicle Cocktail

A few weeks ago I found myself at a new restaurant (to me) known as Jay Luigi down in South Tampa (SoHo). As I scanned the menu I saw a drink that seemed so unique I hadn't seen it in other places.

It was a Orange Creamsicle alcoholic drink and after enjoying the same flavor ice cream a few months ago I needed to try it. In that moment I was not expecting to go on a journey to recreate it, so I only have a pretty weak photo of my ordered drink.

The foam tasted like a mix of vanilla extract and orange creamsicle and I hadn't really tried a drink before that had flavored foam. A few weeks later as Halloween neared I knew I wanted to recreate this drink.

Thankfully this is not a unique drink and Google was full of recipes of different iterations of the same drink. Alyson and I went out to the liquor store and just went on a journey to see what we could obtain from a single trip to the grocery store and liquor store. A very helpful store attendant at the liquor store understood our assignment and helped recommend the perfect selections to complete the drink.

As we got home we had obtained:

• Small amount of half & half
• 1 orange
• A no-pulp orange juice
• Triple sec - De Kuyper
• Whipped vodka - Pinnacle

I don't think I'd ever owned a bottle of whipped vodka before and I was surprised how it smells and tastes like pure vanilla extract. It didn't seem possible that it was a vodka with how vanilla smelling it was.

After reading a bunch of recipes it was clear there were two ways to go about this drink - mix everything together or keep a separation between foam and liquid. I wanted to do the separation approach, but after my first trial run we mixed it all together to try that iteration.

So we started with 2 ounces of half & half, dumped in some whipped vodka and proceeded to froth that into a much more fluffy concoction. While that was going on we did an ounce of orange juice, mixed with some triple sec and shook that over ice to get it chilled.

As both parts were done I strained the bottom layer into a martini glass and layered the foam on top.

This was not a good drink. There was so much half & half that my stomach didn't feel great after drinking a large quantity of it. I'm fairly sure when half & half is put in coffee it's less than an ounce and I had just drank 2 ounces of it with a bunch of liquor.

So it was time to tweak the ingredients to reduce the foam aspect while boosting the orange juice. I also felt like the foam melted back to a liquid very quickly which research told me a pre-frozen glass would prevent that. So it was off to the drawing board for another iteration.

Now as another try arrived. I placed a martini glass in the freezer as well as 1 ounce of half & half mixed with 1 tablespoon of whipped vodka. Research showed that if the half & half was almost frozen it would froth better and stay foam-like longer.

On the orange juice front I increased it to 2 ounces and mixed it with 1 ounce of triple sec and 1 tablespoon of whipped vodka. So in total we had 2 ounces of orange juice and 1 ounce of whipped vodka, triple sec and half & half.

Frothing an almost frozen half & half was insanely better and produced more foam with less liquid than my previous attempt. There wasn't anything different with shaking liquids in a shaker with ice, but I now used the backside of a spoon to layer the foam into the drink to prevent mixing them.

This was a 5oz drink so I could probably adapt the recipe to fit the martini glass with maybe 1 or 2 more ounces of liquid, but this amount of liquid was perfect. This isn't a drink to order multiple of and slam them to get drunk. It's a one-off drink for people to experience a milk based cocktail that reminds them of a childhood of ice cream.

These quantities of ingredients together shined wonderfully. You could easily get foam and liquid in a single sip and it still retained all the benefits of just tasting like an orange creamsicle. We have enough vodka and triple sec to repeat this experiment plenty of times we just might need to get another orange to zest and some more half & half.

As an engineer with zero mixology background it was fun to make a drink based on a bunch of different recipes and after a few tries it was worth it.

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