Thanks to @housepoured on Instagram, I was challenged to come up with a fun daiquiri variation and knocked it out of the part with this Chocolate Mocha Daiquiri. I’d never tried chocolate and lime together, and definitely not with coffee, but I’d had great success with pineapple and coffee, and lemon and chocolate, so I was curious.
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Origins of the Mocha Daiquiri
Let me back up. Months ago I was looking for flavor combinations to try and created a fantastic Tiki Coffee Old Fashioned I called Who’s your Daddy? It combines coffee and pineapple – two flavors I hadn’t thought before to combine. But the two of them make a relatively common appearance together in Tiki drinks.
So I started to think about other citrus/chocolate combinations that worked, like my As You Wish – Chocolate Lavender Sour. It’s one of my favorite cocktails I’ve ever created. And I was inspired by a chocolate tasting that had chocolate infused with lavender paired with a rather sour wine.
When I got the challenge from @housepoured I knew I wanted to do a very non-traditional daiquiri and settled on chocolate. But then I wondered what coffee might add to that flavor profile.
I turns out that coffee, chocolate, lime and rum are a delectable combination.
Here’s Why it Works
A great cocktail is all about balance. It’s a balance of sweet and sour and bitter. It’s a balance of depth of flavor against palatability. And, it’s a balance of aromas playing together in harmonious ways.
Mocha works as a balance between the sweet, earthy depth of chocolate against the bitter profile of coffee. Add in some cream to tame the bitterness a tad and it’s a match made in heaven.
But I wanted to add some sour to the mocha daiquiri – really have a balance between sour, sweet, and bitter. I wanted a cocktail where the base spirit was readily available on tasting it, but one that had elements of all three taste elements as well.
This chocolate mocha daiquiri works because it has just the right balance of all three.
It helps that it’s a fun cocktail that doesn’t take itself too seriously.
The only downside is the color of the cocktail isn’t very exciting, so I added a chocolate glaze to the glass to dress it up a bit and make it a little more fun to drink.
One of the best things about this chocolate mocha daiquiri is that the rum is readily present in the cocktail. I used Appleton Blended Rum and it is present through and through on each sip. Drinking this over ice might dilute the rum to the point that it’s not detectable in the last few sips of the cocktail.
But serving it neat with a drizzle of mocha glaze on the outside of the glass and a twist of lime essential oils on top sells every last sip.
For the coffee-mocha glaze, I simply mixed powdered sugar and cocoa powder together in a 1:1 ratio, then added hot coffee until I had a thick, smooth glaze.
I did add some of Crude Bitters’ ‘Big Bear’ Cocoa Coffee bitters to amp up the bitter coffee notes, but you could make it without.
Mocha Daiquiri – No Take Backs
Ingredients
- 2 oz rum
- 1 oz lime juice
- 3/4 oz coffee liqueur I used XO Café
- 1 oz crème de cocoa
- 12 drops Crude Bitters Big Bear
- Garnish: lime peel mocha glaze
Instructions
- Combine rum, lime juice, coffee liqueur, cocoa liqueur and bitters in a shaker tin and fill with ice. Shake until the outside of the tin is so cold it’s hard to hold. Double strain into a chilled cocktail glass with mocha glaze on the rim.
