Spring has finally sprung. I didn’t actually realize how much I’d missed having my windows open until the weather turned warm enough to force me to have them open, and now I’m loathe to close the place up again. Spring is a wonderful time in my neighborhood—you see, we live on the fourth floor of a very old building with no air conditioning in an area of Los Angeles that regularly tops 95º most days during the summer. During July and August being at home feels sort of like being roasted alive, so the 75º-and-breezy days of March–May are little slices of heaven. Well, heaven with the added bonus of fresh strawberries, but I digress.

We’ve had a rash of particularly fine days this week and decided to celebrate by breaking out a little tiki. I combed and combed through my various tiki tomes looking for a bright, cheerful, springtime sort of drink—of course, most of them fit into one of the categories, but I was feeling demanding and wanted all three. When I hit upon the Lei Lani Volcano in Intoxica!, it was the clear winner.

Well, it was until I started to pour the pineapple juice and was confronted with a very strange, crumpled, green-and-white chunk of…something. It smelled like pineapple but looked like a morel mushroom, thus leading me to the conclusion that our pineapple juice had been taken over by an alien being, thus rendering it useless to my plans. Damn! Necessity being the mother of invention, I juiced a blood orange in the hope that its mild tartness could hold up in the place of pineapple and got to shaking.

3 oz guava nectar
¾ oz blood orange juice
¾ oz fresh lime juice
¼ oz rock candy syrup
2½ oz Cruzan coconut rum

Shake all ingredients over ice and pour into a ceramic coconut mug or, failing that, a big glass. Garnish with a cocktail cherry pinned to an orange slice.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I have made the Lei Lani Volcano before and it is fantastic (if you go in for the sweet drinks, which I do enjoy on occasion). Building on that proven base, this variation was great—sweet but full-flavored, tropical without too much Jimmy Buffett and all the colors of a Hawaiian sunset. Hello, springtime!