The default drink at my house -- when we're not trying something new or returning to some other old favorite that we have a hankering for, is what we call Orange Whiskey. It's basically an austere Old Fashioned with sugar replaced by Cointreau. But last night, I was in the mood to mix it up a little. We have a nice bottle of Caravella orangecello and I wanted to riff on our normal drink but use the creamy low-proof orangecello instead of Cointreau. So I googled a little and settled on using this recipe as a base. The blogger at that link called it the SoCal Sailor.
There've been times when I had Diplomatico Reserva on my bar -- I tend to keep a variety of rums! But not now. Since this was going to be sweetish anyway, I went with Zaya as that's a nice combination of a sweet rum with all the smokey caramel. And I used a different orangecello. Since I was using two sweet spirits, I expressed extra orange oil before garnishing and used more bitters.
As an aside, I used up what I had left of that 5x5 Barrel-aged Vanilla for these drinks. I helped the guy behind that brand get started several years ago through a Kickstarter or IndieGoGo or whatever and ended up for four (I think) of his bottles. They're good. Lots of bitters are good and I'm not saying this is all you should use. But if you like to try stuff, keep this in mind. See their stuff here.
So anyway, it was good. I overdid it on the orange and I think maybe a dryer, finer rum and a 1/4 oz of allspice dram might be a better end-point, but I was glad to try it.
