The Blushing Bride is sweetness personified

If you, like me, were once a bride but never a “blushing” bride, then The Ground Floor in Belleville has a drink for you. The Blushing Bride cocktail proves it’s never too late to be sweet – and just in the nick of time for Valentine’s Day. The Blushing Bride is a delicious, innocent-tasting mix of vanilla vodka, Chambord (a French black raspberry-flavored liqueur) and pineapple juice. The Bride presents a modest, slightly frothy, pastel beauty to those who want her. She is served up in a chilled martini glass. Not the huge, I-could-balance-this-drink-on-my-head-and-cross-River-Des-Peres-without-spilling-a-drop type of glass, but the smaller kind you could take home to meet your mother. The Blushing Bride is a drink made for wooing. The ingredients combine to make a sweet – but not too sweet – drink that tastes almost as if it had coconut in it. It is only fair to say that vanilla vodka is one of my favorite things in the world. When vanilla vodka came on the market, my drinking landscape changed as if an earthquake had hit and shook the seedpods of vanilla vines into all the vodka bottles. Vanilla vodka was also good with all the other stuff I like – Coke, orange juice, cranberry juice, Jägermeister ... OK, not Jägermeister. That was certainly a mistake. But nothing in the Blushing Bride is a mistake, at least as far as romance is concerned. Vanilla has long been prized for its aphrodisiac qualities. The wonderful, jam-like flavor of Chambord, with hints of vanilla and honey, comes from a 300-year-old recipe encompassing all the elegance and beauty of French tradition. Even the pineapple juice has a romantic history. With a perfectly symmetrical shell and crazy green spikes, the decadently sweet fruit was once known only to the very wealthy, who could afford to travel to the West Indies. Unlike many fruits, today’s hybrid pineapples actually taste better than pineapples of yore. If you make this drink for your beloved with fresh-squeezed pineapple juice, that would be a true act of romance. The Bride was invented for a bachelorette party by Amy Cyrus, owner of The Ground Floor. No doubt it was made in honor of a bride-to-be of the “blushing” variety, though I promise you needn’t be one yourself to enjoy the drink. In fact, I imagine you need not even be a woman; plenty of men will find the drink an equally easy quaff, though the pretty presentation, even sans garnish, is rather feminine and might cause blushing. Cyrus, a young woman with pixie-short blond hair, wore painter’s jeans and glasses the night I met her. At first glance she didn’t look like the type of bartender who would create such a darling drink. But she showed her sweet side when she said about her creation that there’s “no need to garnish – the Bride’s beauty stands alone.” It’s almost enough to make me blush in retrospect.