I have been a complete sucker for home-made liqueurs for years now.
I think it started when we were in England in ’76 and I read Richard Mabey’s Food for Free and tried his recipe for Sloe Gin, around the same time I first read Jane Grigsons Good Things which has a marvellous chapter on fruit liqueurs and ratafias.

Sloe Gin was my first success and is possibly the best of the many variations which I have tried to date, I used to make it in the restaurant where it was our bestselling after dinner drink. I actually persuaded a farmers wife from South Kilkenny to pick the sloes and sell them to me in November and would make up the mixture in a five gallon bucket before bottling it at Christmas time each year.

I have of course made many other variations during the years with varying success.
My Thyme liqueur I thought was good, as did my friend Petra, but it was dismissed by most others as too medicinal.
My Quince concoction, about which I held out great hopes, was dreadful. The mixture of rum, cinnamon and orange which I took from a French recipe book went down reasonably well but I thought it a dead ringer for Veno’s Cough Syrup.
I made a very good Plum Schnapps, I thought, from my brother- in- laws orchard in Brittany and a strange black Vin de Noix from walnuts from the same source.

Last summer I read Patricia Wells recipe for an orange liqueur from her terrific book on Provençal food.
The instructions were to half fill a sealable jar with alcohol, hang an orange over, but not touching the alcohol, seal it up again and leave it for about three or four months.
The idea is that the vapour of the alcohol dissolves all the orange oils from the fruit giving an flavour of the essence of orange to the alcohol.

She also recommends buying sugar syrup and flavouring the liqueur with this, to your taste after you have removed the orange.

I tried this in Thezan last August (I thought I had taken a picture of it but can’t find it anywhere)

Stop Press, thanks to the good offices of Caitriona (and her youthful memory) the relevant photo has now been located:

Picture taken in November after 2 months of submersion in the vapours.
(Seeing the pic has reminded me that I also stuck half a dozen cloves into the orange before suspension)
I tried the resulting concoction out this Easter when we were over.

The suspended orange had lost most of its colour to the alcohol which had developed a faint orange tinge, otherwise the orange was intact and, although four months old, fully preserved. I contemplated eating it but it looked so washed out and ill I lost courage and discarded it.
The taste of the alcohol is very encouraging, the flavour of orange is subtle but quite different from that obtained by macerating the whole fruit in alcohol (which I have already tried.)
Putting the sugar syrup in afterwards is an excellent idea.
Most recipes for liqueurs end up over sweetened, this way you can do the sweetening precisely to your taste.

I have a memory of seeing a Bigarade Eau de Vie at some time on my travels in France so nothing else would do but that I should try it myself at home.
Bigarade is the French term for a Seville Orange and it just so happens that I had frozen a couple of these, in February when they were in season, for making an orange sauce for duck.
One I decided to sacrifice in the name of science.
Here is a picture of the set up.

As you can see the alcohol is faintly tinged already after only 24 hours of suspension.
I will come back to it before the summer is out and have a test tasting.
Also in the picture are the alcohol and the sugar syrup, both freely available in supermarkets in France and well worth buying if, like me , you want to try out a few liqueurs. You can of course substitute any cheap vodka for the alcohol and make your own sugar syrup by dissolving sugar in water over heat.

Nota Bene; The resulting liqueur, undiluted by anything except a few drops of orange oil, remains about 40% proof. Small glasses only!