Your Weekend Tiki Cocktail: The Blue Hawaiian

As I was driving the convertible into work this morning, Bing’s version of Blue Hawaii came on the XM-band radio. It was like, kismet, man. So here it is, for you laid-back swingers who want to bask in the hot tropical sun,

The Blue Hawaiian

An easy drink to make, this Tiki Cocktail looks kool, tastes great and is very refreshing on hot sandy beach.

1 oz silver rum
 (or kick it up with an ounce of Sailor Jerry or Bacardi 151)
1 oz blue curacao
2 oz pineapple juice
1 oz cream of coconut (Coco Loco)
Cherry
Fresh Pineapple
Orchid

Shake the rum, curacao, pineapple juice and cream of coconut well in shaker with ice and strain into a clear hurricane glass filled with ice cubes. Garnish it up with a sword full of cherries and pineapple, and top it off with the orchid. If you don’t have an orchid, don’t sweat it. Just put one of those little plastic mermaids on the side of the glass.

You can also go a step further and do the more popular frozen variety by adding a cup of crushed ice and blending. Vodka is often substituted for rum in the Frozen Blue Hawaiian, thanks to the efforts of Smirnoff’s marketing department. But who ever heard of Hawaiians drinking blue vodka? Wait…I don’t think Hawaiians originally had rum either. C’est la vie, baby.

-Tiki Chris reporting from behind the bar at Tiki Lounge Talk, the swingin’ tiki blog for tikiphiles and retro-lovin’ hep kats.

Tiki Oasis in Sunny Cali Starts Thursday!

Tikiphiles from all over the galaxy will be hitting the landing pads in San Diego this weekend for Tiki Oasis, “the largest and longest running Tiki Event on planet earth.” If you’re going, you’ve already laid down the lettuce for your tix and are probably either checking into the hotel or getting ready to jump on the plane. If you’re not going, you can live digitally vicariously through the tweets, posts and pix of the lucky ducks that will be there! (Just check out Tiki Central for Tiki Oasis Overload).

According to the official website, Tiki Oasis is “a family produced event by Otto and Baby Doe von Stroheim of Tiki News Magazine…the Tiki Oasis is the Tiki community’s annual reunion! Guests have the opportunity to honor historic sites and celebrate all aspects of Tiki Style. We are proud to celebrate our 10th Anniversary Tiki Oasis event!

Crown Plaza Hotel, site of Tiki Oasissis

This kat will not be traveling the 3000 miles this year…I dumped all my dough on The Hukilau in Fort Lauderdale But I’ll be keeping an eye on the posts of some of my pals who will be there, including Marina the Fire Eating Mermaid (who will be performing), the kool kats at Fez-O-Rama and the kids at Vintage Roadside. And believe me, I will be with you in spirit (that spirit being dark rum!)

Wishing everyone at Tiki-O a great, swingin’ time! Have a Mai Tai for me…and feel free to post comments or photos here or at The Retro Tiki Lounge on Facebook!

Aloha and Mahalos, Tiki Chris reporting from the travel desk at Tiki Lounge Talk.

Tiki Drink for the Weekend: The Sweet Caroline

Ok, I know I’m a little slow on the draw this week for your Tiki Drink Recipe. Sometimes part of living the Tiki Lifestyle means sleeping until 2pm for no reason.

I made this one up, but I’m sure I’m not the first to mix these ingredients together. I call it a Sweet Caroline. It’s got a nice sweet taste, with citrus kick. Kind of like this girl named Caroline I used to know.

1 oz Midori
1 oz Amaretto
1 oz Sour Mix
Fill with Orange Juice

Pour over ice in a large glass and stir. Garnish with an orange slice and a cherry. Pretty simple, very tasty! The sugars seem to make the booze hit your head faster than you’d think, so be careful with this one, kids.

-Tiki Chris reporting from under the table at Tiki Lounge Talk

Weekend Tiki Cocktail: Singapore Sling; Wreck Bar Tonight

Another great summer drink for your Tiki Bar is an old favorite…

The Singapore Sling

Even the name of this bright red cocktail evokes the essence of exotic, taking you to mysterious, far-away places without leaving your bar stool. Developed at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore around the turn of the century, a modified version of the original is still served there today.

Here’s the old fashioned version of the recipe, from back in the days when sophisticated cocktails meant sophisticated ingredients:

2 oz gin
3/4 oz Cherry Heering
2 tsp Benedictine
2 tsp Cointreau
2 oz pineapple juice
3/4 oz fresh lime juice
2 dashes pomegranate grenadine
1 dash Angostura bitters
Soda water
Maraschino cherry
Pineapple wedge
Orange wheel

Throw together everything except the soda and garnish in a shaker. (If you’re not sure which ingredients are the garnish, please put down the shaker and ask an adult to supervise.) Shake it up,and strain into a hurricane or highball glass with a few rocks of ice. Top it off with a splash soda water. Garnish with a cherry, a pineapple slice, and orange skewered on one of those little plastic pirate swords.

The Raffels Hotel in Singapore, Birthplace of the Singapore Sling

This less interesting but still very groovy tasting alternative is much more popular today, and a hell of a lot easier to concoct. Generally if you order a sling today, you’ll get a nice red gin drink. It’s good stuff.

1 dash  Cherry Liqueur
4 oz  Club Soda
1 oz  Gin
0.5 oz  Grenadine
0  cracked Ice
0  cubes Ice
2 oz  bottled Sour mix

Toss everything into the shaker except the soda and ice cubes and shake, shake, shake Senora. Strain over the rocks in a hurricane glass and ad the soda. Then garnish as above. Make sure you use the pirate sword or it’s not a sling. A little plastic monkey or mermaid on the side of the glass is an added bonus.

Speaking of Mermaids…

Mermaids at the Wreck Bar Tonight, 6:15pm, Fort Lauderdale Yankee Clipper Hotel

Mermaids at the Wreck Bar, Yankee Clipper

We’ll be sipping Singapore Slings at the Wreck Bar tonight as we watch the enchanting Marina the Fire Eating Mermaid and her pod of sea lovelies swimming it up in the hotel pool. It’s always fun to watch the mermaids do their underwater antics. If you’re Fort Lauderdale, stop on by!

-Tiki Chris Pinto reporting from behind the bar at Pirate’s Cove Tiki Bar, in the kool little corner of my lanai.

Tropical Storm may squash weekend plans in Cocoa Beach

If you follow me on Twitter or The Retro Tiki Lounge on Facebook, you’ve probably heard we’ve been planning a trip to the Space Coast, Cocoa Beach for this weekend. It’s been an up-and-down/on-and-off-and-back-on-again krazy kind of plan. We were originally going to swing up to Orlando (with a stop in Cocoa) on a work/trip, but the work part got canceled. We managed to rescue the Cocoa Beach part of the trip, but several events in the last week (flat tire, sudden influx of rescue puppies and kittens, dates moved on paying gigs with the little lady, etc etc) have severely screwed things up.

As of yesterday, we were all set up for a cruise up to Cocao today. Then this goofy Tropical storm, which is all the way down in the Caribbean, decided to fling itself into a big mess of rain clouds and shot some rain all the way up the East Coast of Florida. So as of now, 10:30 am on Friday, here in Fort Lauderdale is a big soggy wreck of a day, and our sources north tell us Cocoa Beach isn’t much different.

One thing you should know about Florida: The best stuff to do is outdoors. Even the Tiki Bars are all either open-air, on the water (Like Islamorada) or have great tropical gardens (like the Mai Kai). So zipping around in the rain is maximum dullsville.

Cocoa Beach is full of kool old ’50s motels and Tiki-ness. It’s like you can’t get drunk and fall over without hitting a Tiki. There are great Tiki Carvers up there, and lots of fun beachy stuff. And the plan was to take lots of pix and post a report on this seaside Tiki lovers’ getaway. But I’m afraid this TS-Bonnie is going to squash the plans on this foray into vintage-meets-neo tiki culture. It’s no fun driving three hours on I-95 in buckets of rain, even in the sleek little Cruiser with the aquatreds, especially if it’s to spend most of the time sitting in the motel room waiting for the rain to stop. So, we’ll see how it plays out today. If Bonnie bows out by tonight, we’ll swing up tomorrow instead of today. If not, this weekend will be a great time to catch up on some writing.

More to come…

Later Gators.

-Tiki Chris, soaking wet and not packed yet, reporting from under the overhang of the lanai at Pirate’s Cove Tiki Bar. Tiki Lounge Talk, The Tiki Culture Blog for Hep Kats and Swingin’ Kittens.