chocolate daisy

Juice of a Lemon (3/4 oz Lemon (*) Juice)
1/2 glass Spanish Brandy (1 oz Pedro Domecq Fundador Solera Reserva)
1/2 glass Port Wine (1 oz Taylor Fladgate Ruby)
1/3 glass Raspberry Syrup (2/3 oz)

Shake with ice and strain into a glass filled with chipped ice. Garnish with fruit.
(*) "Lemon" in the Caribbean generally means lime (same word), but I figured lemon would go better with brandy and port than lime would. Lime is more traditional though.
One of the books I purchased at Tales of the Cocktail was The Art of Making a Cocktail, a 1927 Cuban cocktail book reprinted by Mixellany. On a first pass, the Chocolate Daisy stood out as a good place to start. Here the name has as much to do with cacao products as the classic Coffee Cocktail does with a cup of joe; however, both of them have a base of brandy and port which can mix to create a brownish hue. While Daisies are a well-established class of syrup- or liqueur-sweetened Sours, there is a Chocolate Daisy plant that was discovered in the early 1800s in Texas and northern Mexico. Jean-Louis Berlandier, the French-Swiss physician and botanist who discovered it, named it after the chocolate odor that is released when the petals are plucked from the flower head. Instead of that aroma, the drink proffered a brandy and port one that included the orange slices that we used a garnish. The port's grape notes continued on in the sip along with the lemon, and the raspberry appeared on the swallow along with some dryness from the brandy's barrel aging. In retrospect, the raspberry would have worked well enough with lime to overcome my lemon-brandy pairing bias, but either way, this drink recipe will be tasty.