one hundred cocktails

drinking with a purpose

Diki-Diki Cocktail

12 Oct 2011

What a terrible name for a cocktail! We’ll get to that, though.

An ingredient of the next two cocktails in the book is Swedish Punsch. It’s not mentioned in the resource guide for the book, and it’s somehow taken for granted that everybody just has this shit sitting around. I’m afraid that’s just not accurate. As far as I can tell, nobody in the country has even heard of the stuff, save for a distributor in the midwest that doesn’t distribute to anybody I can buy from.

The eGullet forums recommending finding a friend going to Sweden, and asking them to bring a bottle of the stuff back with them. I don’t have any friends going to Sweden, and I couldn’t really justify a trip there just to pick up a cocktail mixer. That’d be neat and all, but c’mon.

So I hunted. For a while. Finally, I figured out that DrinkUpNY had this thing called Batavia-Arrack Van Oosten. I ordered a bottle of the stuff; their site blew up while I was ordering, but lo and behold, a bottle of the stuff showed up a few days later. It’s high proof and brutal to taste straight. It’s fire water with kirsch, death, dry powder (think talc), and so much astringency. This is what you give to somebody to teach them what astringency is like. It’s brutal.

Yay, so I’d found Swedish Punsch. It was sort of weird, but cool, I could make progress. Here come the ingredients for the next cocktail. Pay no attention to why I’m talking about the next cocktail:

Ingredients for doctor. Sort of.

Mixed it up, it looked like this:

Nothing to see here.

Taste? Like death. I actually drew a skull and crossbones on my sheet of notes. The words: sour, unpleasant, astringent, stomach-turning, vile.

I was obviously doing something wrong. I figured out what it was rather quickly. Batavia-Arrack Van Oosten isn’t Swedish Punsch. It’s an ingredient in Swedish Punsch.

Whoops. So it was time to make Swedish Punsch. Here’s what goes into that:

Lets make Swedisch punch actually.

And, if you serve it straight as advised (over rocks), it makes a pretty little thing:

Look, frogs! And Swedish Punsch.

Aren’t those the best sponge holders ever? I know, right. Best girlfriend ever. Anyway, the Swedish Punsch isn’t in the frog toad things, but is in the glass next to them. How does it taste? Hard to describe. Spicy, toasty, astringent, acidic. Sort of like tea steeped in liquor with some kerosene and oak thrown in. It’s weird. I could drink it, I think, as a pensive cold drink, which I want pretty much never, and would prefer a Sazerac, but that’s neither here nor there.

So I now had some Swedish Punsch! It’s time to make the Diki-Diki. Here goes:

Actually Diki-Diki ingredients.

Don’t be a hater about the Tropicana. We’re making cocktails here, folks. Mixed up and garnished with an apple slice, we get another of what appears to be a brown cocktail (surprise, right?):

Finished diki diki

Taste? Like a red delicious apple. Mealy, weak apple flavor, no crispness or bite. Why do people eat red delicious apples? They’re terrible! Some of the spice of cider. Mild on the palate, which is dangerous, since there’s a ton of Calvados in this thing. It goes together well, but the end result just isn’t that interesting. A very pleasant cocktail for somebody who doesn’t want something that tastes of alcohol, and yet doesn’t want something that’s overly sweet. It’s not cloying, and the fruit is more ephemeral than up-front. I wouldn’t bother drinking it again, though, personally.