Recipe

• 3 parts vodka

• 1 part pineapple juice

• 1 part Chambord

• Lemon zest

Squeeze the oil from the zest into a cocktail shaker.  Throw the zest in, along with everything else, and shake with plenty of ice.  Pour into a martini glass and serve.

These aren't the proportions most people use for a French Martini, but it's what the IBA recipe says, and I'm a sucker for international standards (see also the YYYY-MM-DD date format on this blog).  It results in a surprisingly sweet and drinkable cocktail, not as sickly or as outrageously pineappley as other recipes I've had.  If I were to criticise, I'd say it was a bit boring, with the Chambord's raspberry flavour crushing anything else in there.  But I'd drink it again! The whole zest-squeezing thing is highly suspect.  I peeled some rind off a lemon using a potato-peeler, making sure to get only the yellow outer bit, and I squeezed it with the pores facing outwards in order to try to get the oil in the cocktail shaker, but I'm not really sure whether anything happened – I certainly couldn't taste it.  In future I might skip instructions that tell me to squeeze oil out of things, and just add rind as a garnish instead.  We'll see.