British author known for his 1984 novel Money / TUE 5-2-23 / Final Oldsmobile model / First female singer to have multiple albums exceed 10 billion streams on Spotify / Pioneering synthesizers introduced in the 1960s

Constructor: Aimee Lucido

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: JAMES BOND (37A: Character associated with the beverage "shaken" in this puzzle's circled letters) — letters in MARTINI are "shaken" (scrambled) inside four theme answers:
Theme answers:

• DOMINATRIX (17A: Woman who might wield a whip)
• MINI-MARTS (25A: Gas station conveniences)
• MT. RAINIER (53A: Tallest peak in the Cascades)
• MARTIN AMIS (62A: British author known for his 1984 novel "Money")

Word of the Day: BURRATA (42D: Mozzarella-and-cream cheese often served as an appetizer) —

Burrata (Italian pronunciation: [burˈrata]) is an Italian cow milk (occasionally buffalo milk) cheese made from mozzarella and cream. The outer casing is solid cheese, while the inside contains stracciatella and cream, giving it an unusual, soft texture. It is typical of Puglia. (wikipedia) 

Stracciatella di bufala (Italian pronunciation: [strattʃaˈtɛlla di ˈbuːfala]) is a cheese produced from Italian buffalo milk in the province of Foggia, located in the southern Italian region of Apulia, using a stretching (pasta filata) and a shredding technique. // Stracciatella cheese is composed of small shreds—hence its name, which in Italian is a diminutive of straccia ("rag" or "shred") meaning "a little shred". It is a stretched curd fresh cheese, white in colour, and made the whole year round, but is thought to be at its best during the spring and summer months. This stracciatella is unusual in that buffalo herds and the cheeses made from their milk are much more common over on the western side of the Apennines in Lazio and Campania. // When mixed with thick cream, stracciatella is also used to make burrata (Italian for "buttered"): this is a rich, buttery textured cheese which comes enclosed in a bag of mozzarella and is thought to have been originally created in the early 20th century in Andria on the Murgia plateau. It is also now made outside Italy, especially in the United States and Argentina. Since neither stracciatella nor burrata keeps well even when refrigerated, these cheeses need to be consumed promptly, while they are still soft and fresh.

It's hard to believe that the cocktail "shaker"—and particularly JAMES BOND's"shaken, not stirred" catchphrase— hasn't been used for the basis of a scrambled-letter theme before. And maybe it has. But I don't recall any such puzzle in the NYTXW and I can't find one by searching my blog's database so I guess this concept was just sitting under everyone's nose for decades until Aimee finally noticed it. It's textbook stuff—take a familiar phrase and literalize it via wordplay. It probably would've been ideal if the "shaken" part were expressed in an actual answer instead of a clue, but there's probably no good way to do that. SHAKEN on its own is not a snappy revealer, and SHAKEN NOT STIRRED would've been inaccurate (that is, both "shaken" and "stirred" are apt ways of thinking about letter scrambling, so the "NOT" would mess up your wordplay). So we get JAMES BOND, which is probably our best option. A bit limp, maybe, but it does neatly avoid ever using the actual word "martini" anywhere in the puzzle. The whole concept is a bit straightforward, but then it is a Tuesday, so you're not trying to baffle people. Still, once I hit JAMES BOND, I filled all four of the remaining themers in instantly, so the thematic fun was over very fast: