For my New Year’s Eve party, I had juiced about a bag of limes. Then everyone ended up drinking French 75’s and 95’s all night, so while the bag of lemons got used up, the limes were basically untouched.

Rather than pitching them the next day, I decided to make some lime cordial. Lime cordial is, like most cocktail syrups, incredibly easy to make. You merely mix equal parts lime juice, and sugar, zest in the peel from the limes you used, and heat to a boil. Let simmer for a couple minutes, cool, and then toss in the fridge. The next day strain out the peels and you have a beautiful cordial.

My first thought to use it was the gimlet because, well, I don’t know if I’ve ever had any other cocktail that uses lime cordial, and that I’ve probably only ever had with that god awful Rose’s crap you’d get from a supermarket. (The ingredients of Rose’s are high fructose corn syrup, lime juice concentrate, sodium metabisulfite, natural flavors, and Blue 1. I couldn’t serve that to anyone I cared about.) So the gimlet deserved a do-over.

I used Jim Meehan’s recipe from the PDT Cocktail Book, still my favorite source for classic cocktail recipes. The recipe was:

2 oz. Plymouth Gin

.75 oz. lime cordial

.75 oz fresh lime juice

Shake and strain into a coupe, and garnish with a lime wheel.

Tell me that ain’t beautiful! (I know the wash line is too low, my coupes are too large. I ended up increasing the recipe by 25% after that first one.)

The result was fantastic. It’s basically a gin daiquiri. In fact, I’m going to play around with rum and see if I can’t make a baller daiquiri out of it, because fuck Hemingway. (Ok, he’s one of my favorite writers, but the drink named after him sucks.) It would also go well with tequila I think in some version of a margarita.

Anyway, while the snow is falling this weekend crank the heat up to 80, put your board shorts on, pretend you’re in Aruba, and drink the gimlet.