"Only seven days to go, and then my summer vacation is over." - Roxas in Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days

Inspiration

Roxas is Sora’s Nobody in the Kingdom Hearts series, which basically means he’s Sora—but without a heart, right? Well, not exactly. In a twist typical of Kingdom Hearts, Roxas does have a heart, but it belongs to someone else: Ventus, a character who looks strikingly similar—practically identical—to Roxas. So, if Roxas is a mix of Sora and Ventus, it only makes sense that a cocktail inspired by him would draw from both.

This Roxas mocktail combines the same two components of coconut (for Sora) and green tea (for Ventus) as the Roxas cocktail. “Mockxas” is served as a cup of cold brewed green tea topped with a coconut sweet cream with a slight bitterness from reduced tonic water and a pinch of sea salt.

Workshopping

Coconut + Green Tea without Alcohol?

To accomplish the combo of coconut and green tea for the alcoholic recipe, I used the fat-washing technique to quell the bitter qualities of over-steeped green tea. Add a bit of extra acid to the infusion with coconut milk, let it curdle, and filter it out. What resulted was a great infused spirit that I tried to replicate here without the alcohol.

I started with four green tea bags in about 1 L of hot water and let it steep for a few hours. 2 cups of tea were added to ½ cup of coconut milk, and I titrated enough 10% citric acid solution to get it to curdle. This is the same process for the infused gin in the alcoholic recipe, but I needed to add almost 65 times as much acid to get it to curdle. Although it clarified well, it got sour enough that it tasted terrible, like sour bath water. Yuck! I tried one more time, this time curdling the coconut milk first and then adding it to the green tea afterward. I figured with less dilution from the green tea perhaps I’d have better luck. Well, this time I only needed 45 times more acid, but it still tasted like coconut milk that had gone bad. Could this go well in other applications? Sure, but for Mockxas, this method just wasn’t going to work. Roxas is a bit bitter, but I wouldn’t say that he’s particularly sour!

Salty… No Sweet Cream!

What resulted from both of my clarification attempts with coconut milk above was a sort of sour coconut curd. This will happen any time that we clarify something by curdling it. There are always some remains left behind, and I tend to taste those to see what I might be able to do with them. In both cases, I got a sort of lemony coconut merengue-flavored cream that seemed thick enough to spread on toast. It could be good for breakfast, but it didn’t vibe with me for something to drink. The leftover curds gave me the idea of doing a drink similar to those sweet cream coffees that you can get at some coffee shops but with tea instead.

So I focused my efforts on making a coconutty sweet cream fit for Roxas fitting these criteria: It had to be sweet. It had to be able to float on top of green tea. And it had to be a little salty and a little bitter (he’s a fan of sea salt ice cream after all! How could we leave that out?) I started with a very simple sweet cream template by adding 2 oz heavy cream, to 1 oz coconut milk and whipped it until I just began to see it getting stiff. It was sweet, heavy, and coconutty and it floated on green tea. Smooth sailing this time! Add a bit of salt to the mix and it becomes sweet and a lil’ bit salty too. Even better! But what about the bitter? (“Why bitter?”, you make ask. I go on a rant about some existential journey of Roxas in the cocktail blog post)

Making a mildly bitter cream could be as easy as adding a bit of fizzy tonic water to the cream before whipping, but things get a little odd when we add a carbonated ingredient to the mix. First of all, trying to measure carbonated ingredients by volume is a bit unreliable. Measurement devices typically have a lot of points for bubbles to form, causing CO₂ to come out of the solution and change the volume of the measurement before it even is added or afterward! You could measure by weight instead, which is a great technique for measuring carbonated ingredients like champagnes or sodas, but I had a bitter ~ erm better idea.

I’d heat up the tonic water and reduce it to get rid of all the bubbles first! So I took a whole container of tonic water and set it on a low simmer for a few hours until I stopped seeing most of the bubbles and only steam was rising from the pot. I started with 1L or 1037g of tonic water and ended with 705.3 g, reducing the tonic water by 32%. Adding this now-decarbonated tonic was exactly what I needed to add a slightly bitter kick to that cream.

Mockxas was pretty much done at this point, but I took it one step further by making some small blue coconut balls. They’re light enough that they’ll sit right on top of the cream, and although I only use one for my presentation, you can add as many as you like! To make your own blue orbs, take some coconut chunks and carve them into spheres, then let them sit in some water with blue food dye until they are the right hue. Pat dry, and then you’re good to go!

Flavor Analysis

A flavor of creamy coconut with a mild bitterness followed by a simple floral tea.