What's Jayme drinking?

It may not seem like it, but I am a relatively latecomer to mixed drinks. Seriously. From college on, I mostly drank beer. Then I got into homebrew. When The Wife and I got married, we started exploring wine, because that's what grown-up do, right? Until I discovered tiki a few years back, I thought rum and Coke was a pretty swanky cocktail. That just shows how backward my thinking was.

That said, I did have a close encounter with mixed drinks way back in 1988, the fall of my freshman year at college. My roommate at the time was really into motorsports. He was in the car club at Texas A&M, and at some point that year, he participated in a road rally from College Station to Conroe, and invited me along to serve as his navigator. Needless to say, we ended up lost and arrived at the lakehouse hours after we were supposed to arrive. But that's neither here nor there. The important thing is, we did not miss the party. During the party, one of the upperclassmen was passing out shooters. But not just any shooter--it was this amazing, layered thing he called a "Jellyfish" that simply blew my young mind. It was a layered drink, not unlike the pousse cafe (although it'd be decades before I knew what a pousse cafe was) and my callow self was amazed that such a thing was even possible. It made an impression, obviously. With the dawn of the internet era, I would go online looking for the recipe every few years only to come up empty. Empty, that is, until a few months ago. Bingo! The Jellyfish shooter had made its way onto the interwebz!

Last year, I discovered the Home Bar Awards on Instagram, and have had a bit of fun entering ever since. The first challenge of 2020 was "What The G*rnish?" Absurd cocktail garnishes were the rule, the more outlandish, the better. Naturally, my cocktail had to match, so I set the Wayback Machine to the 1980s to recreate that first layered cocktail I ever experienced. The only trouble was, it was an 80s drink. Much like that decade, it emphasized style over substance. The ingredients list is grim: the Jellyfish is cloyingly sweet, making this one equal parts amazing and awful. But mostly awful.

Here's the thing about layered cocktails that demystifies them--it's all about density. The densest of the liquors goes in first, then lighter ones are added, finishing up with the lightest. In practice, "density" equates to sugar content, so the sweetest goes in first. Maddeningly, the creme de cacao I had is one of the lest sweet versions of this liqueur available (although it was still pretty sweet) so my initial attempts ended in a murky mess. I actually had to add sugar to the first layer before I was able to make it layer properly. By the time I finally got a decent photo, I was thoroughly sick of this one!

...

THE JELLYFISH (shooter)
1 oz. White creme de cacao
.5 oz. Amaretto
.5 oz. Irish cream
Grenadine

Pour creme de cacao into a tall shooter glass. Carefully layer amaretto, then Irish cream over the creme de cacao by slowly pouring over an inverted spoon. Finally, add 5-6 drops of grenadine. The grenadine will rapidly sink to the bottom, pulling "tendrils" along behind it. Garnish with aquarium plants, fake stone shrines, aquarium gravel and a life-sized silicone jellyfish.

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