• Julia Thiel

Creme de cacao isn’t just dated—it’s all but defunct as a serious cocktail ingredient. Usually found on the bottom shelf, stuck between other sickly sweet liqueurs, it ranks right up there with Sour Apple Pucker and Boone’s Farm in the hierarchy of respectable booze. I’m pretty sure I had it in college, where it featured in classics like the Peppermint Patty (creme de cacao with peppermint schnapps or creme de menthe). The site webtender.com lists nearly 200 cocktails with creme de cacao, most with names like Almond Joy or Banana Cream Pie, featuring ingredients like amaretto, banana liqueur, Bailey’s, blue curacao, butterscotch schnapps, and Kahlua. It seems to be one of those liqueurs aimed at people who want to get drunk but hate the taste of alcohol.

  • Julia Thiel
  • You could probably start with cheaper vodka, but I had this on hand and wasn’t going to do anything else with it.

I looked up recipes and narrowed it down to three—from Serious Eats, the Drink Blog, and Punch—all using cacao nibs (other options include cocoa powder or chocolate extract). I usually trust Serious Eats recipes, but after comparing their version to a similar one at the Drink Blog and realizing the former had more than six times as much sugar, I decided to skip it. Instead I settled on the Drink Blog recipe and one from Portland, Oregon’s Teardrop Lounge (part of the Punch article) that uses high-proof demerara rum instead of the vodka called for in the first two recipes I’d seen—and only half as much sugar as the Drink Blog one.

  • Julia Thiel
  • Caramelizing the cacao nibs

My modified proportions:375 ml 151-proof demerara rum½ cup cacao nibs2 tablespoons sugar (1/8 cup)2 tablespoons water

  • Julia Thiel
  • Vodka base on the left, rum on the right—they’re pretty much identical in color

The rum-based creme de cacao wasn’t a total bust, though. I experimented with making a few cocktails, all variations on the classic Alexander, and the rum version of creme de cacao worked better than the vodka one. (Those experiments will be the subject of another blog post—and whenever the Mixellany site goes back online, I’m planning to try out some other cocktails as well.)