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A glowing orang drink in an old-fashioned style glass. A dehydrated citrus garnish that looks like a sun sits on the rim and is engulfed in yellow and blue flames. The blackboard behind says Kingdom Hearts II
A light blue tropical drink cartoon with a straw and a citrus wheel

Inspiration

Axel, the fiery Nobody from Kingdom Hearts and a standout member of Organization XIII, embodies a duality that’s both intense and approachable. This cocktail balances cinnamon to represent his fiery side with honey to reflect his unwavering loyalty to friends like Roxas and Xion—he really sticks with them! His iconic flaming chakrams, the “Eternal Flames,” inspired the striking garnish: a lemon sun that adds a bright, flavorful component to the drink. Represented as an approachable Old Fashioned, this cocktail symbolizes Axel’s warmth, sweetness, and his deep connection to cherished memories.



Workshopping

Axel’s Chakrams

Two things come to mind first when I think of Axel: his strikingly red hair and those radical circle-shaped weapons of his (specifically, these are called chakrams). From my first battle with him in Kingdom Hearts Re: Chain of Memories, I had this feeling that if I made him into a drink, I’d bring those chakrams with him. I can’t remember exactly where I first saw the trick, but I think it was an Instagram video showcasing a few garnish “hacks”. The creator cut a slice of their lemon to create a wheel, and then they inverted it. I thought, “That’s cool”, and then they put another lemon wheel inside of the inverted one. “Now that’s cooler!”


The garnish felt like a perfect focal point for his drink. Before I began determining the liquid recipe for Axel’s cocktail, I focused first on how to make the most of his weapon. Making the base lemon sun garnish (which you can also use any other spoke-centered citrus for) isn’t very difficult. Cut off a circular crosssection, a wheel, towards the center of the lemon. Begin to push into the center until it begins to tear apart at the seams between the inner spokes. We want to use enough force to tear the spokes apart, but not too much as to tear the rind. Once the inner pieces are mostly free, try twisting the rind to invert it. I found it easiest to hold the rind with my thumb and middle fingers at two points, using both of my hands. I push in with both of my thumbs and pull back with my middle fingers. Once a particular part of the rind was twisted, I’d move around the circle and repeat until the lemon wheel became a hollow circle with 6-8 spikes around the circumference. Next, cut another wheel, this one with a smaller diameter than your first one (cut a bit away front the center this time). Fit this smaller piece into the hollow center of the first one. There’s evidently some art to this, because most of my suns didn’t come out easily. I found the most success by cutting wheels about 0.5 cm thick towards the center of the lemon. Anything smaller risks tearing easily, and a slice that is too thick is either too big to invert or winds up having an awkward curve to it. The hollow centers sometimes didn’t fit another slice for another part of the same lemon, so I picked up quite a few and mixed and matched my inner wheels to my outer suns until I found combos that fit snuggly.


To take things one step further, I dehydrate the lemon sun to give it a charred look. When dehydrated, it also makes it easier for some flaming flair. To dehydrate, pop this in a dehydrator or an oven on the lowest setting until the yellow innards of the lemon wheel shrivel up and turn brown. Depending on how you positioned your inner wheel, the centers might pop out or stay locked in place from the outer rind shrinking. I typically checked on the suns every hour or so and repositioned them as I could. If you use a dehydrator like I do, I pop ‘em in there at 140 degrees Fahrenheit and can safely handle them with my bare hands. For the flair, soak the dehydrated chakram in a bit of lemon extract and light ablaze. You can generate some sparks by dashing ground cinnamon overtop creating your own flurry of dancing flames! Note, you might want to extinguish the garnish before it begins crumbling into your drink, unless you like it that way.



Almost Honey Lemon Cheong

To determine Axel’s liquid recipe, I immediately gravitated towards a cinnamon flavor palette for its perceived spiciness when used for infusions. The perceived heat of cinnamon would be balanced with lemon to match the impression given by the burnt or flaming chakram garnish. Axel is a very approachable guy, and he really cares about the people he is close with, like Roxas and Xion. He’s just an “I fight for my friends” kinda dude, and he also kinda hates traitors despite the irony. A very approachable drink, I find, is an Old Fashioned, a simple and sweetened spirit-forward cocktail. I used honey to add some sweetness to the cinnamon and lemon combo.


In some early workshopping, I combined some cinnamon liqueurs together with lemon juice and honey syrup, but the flavor wasn’t biting enough for me in the way that I wanted. For something that was more in line with an Old Fashioned, I didn’t want to add citrus juice, which would take this into an entirely different category of drink. So how to get that lemon flavor, without the juice? Well, a while back I saw a recipe pop up on how to make cheong, a Korean ingredient typically made with sugar or honey.


Making cheong is similar to macerating other fruits by essentially putting sugar on top of them and letting the physics get to work, drawing out the flavor from the fruit and liquifying the granules of sugar. You typically thinly slice your fruits and layer them in a sealed container with sugar or honey, and let them infuse for a long time. In traditional recipes, the mixture is left long enough to begin fermenting a bit from the natural yeasts present in the air and surface of the fruit. I haven’t yet left my solution of honey and lemon long enough for it to begin fermenting significantly, so I can’t say I used cheong for Axel’s recipe, yet! Instead, I refer to the syrup I made as lemon-infused honey. I found that by covering stacked, seeded, and thinly sliced lemon slices with honey and letting it sit in a jar for a week or two, the honey became much thinner and took on a mildly tart lemon flavor. This is where the development stops for Axel’s cocktail, but I take this concept a bit further for Axel’s mocktail, Lea.



A Balancing Act

With this lemon-infused honey, I got to work determining the final recipe. I needed to combine this homemade ingredient with a cinnamon liqueur and I had two options that I gave myself. On one hand, I’d try the Infusion of Spirit that I created for my Legend of Zelda series of drinks, and on the other hand, some store-bought cinnamon liqueur (like Fireball of Goldschläger).


I started by trying to see which cinnamon spirit worked with the honey lemon solution and in what ratio. The Fireball cinnamon whiskey brought out a lot of the bitter lemon notes of the solution, which I didn’t quite appreciate in this context. The Goldschläger cinnamon liqueur had a very clean flavor with a nice background of lemon, but a lot of the honeyed sweetness fell away. I went with the Infusion of Spirit, which is arak liqueur infused with cinnamon and melted honeycomb. The infusion is very strong on the cinnamon which brings a very dry mouthfeel, and no matter how I ratioed it, the honey and lemon notes stuck around. At this point, I searched around for a base spirit to kick up the proof a bit and mellow out the potent honey and cinnamon flavors.


Something in my gut told me this was going to be a brandy Old Fashioned. Perhaps it was Axel’s spiky red hair that reminded me of apples. I don’t know, but I whipped up some demo drinks with three bases: E&J VS Brandy, Courvoisier VS Cognac, and Laird’s Blended Applejack. Each demo drink got an initial ¼ oz Infusion of Spirit and ½ oz honey lemon solution.


The brandy base cocktail brought back those bitter lemon notes again, which weren’t terrible in this context, but I still wanted more of the honey sweetness that was present in the honey lemon solution initially. The applejack base was plenty flavorful, with a pleasant appley tartness now added as well. However, compared to the Cognac base, the applejack was accenting too much of the honey now, and not enough of the cinnamon. Using Cognac as the base provided such a unique boost to the woody flavor of the cinnamon while preserving that subtle honey note, especially on the end of the palate.


So I first settled on stirring the Cognac, the lemon-infused honey, and the honeycomb and cinnamon-infused spirit. There was a piece of me, however, that couldn’t shake the opportunity to shake this cocktail. See what I did there? Typically we shake drinks with citrus juice to “wake” up flavors, but there’s technically no juice in this. Drinks that have ingredients with a lot of protein, like honey, tend to produce magnificent foams when agitated as such. So, I did a side-by-side comparison of this recipe shaken and stirred to see which one I preferred. Shaking this recipe did look very nice, but the flavor felt watered down and unbalanced. There’s just not enough sourness from the lemon-infused honey. With that, I settled on keeping Axel calm and stirred.



Flavor Analysis

Mildly tart and spirit-forward with a honeyed lemon flavor. A dry texture lingers with notes of spicy Ceylon cinnamon and honey.

Axel

Axel

  • 2 oz (60 ml) Cognac (Courvoisier VS)
  • 0.5 oz (15 ml) Lemon-Infused Honey Syrup
  • 0.25 oz (7.5 ml) Cinnamon and Honeycomb Infused-Arak Liqueur

Method: Stir & Strain

Garnish: Dehydrated Lemon Sun Chakram

More drinks inspired by: Kingdom Hearts

Guided Recipe in 60 Seconds: YouTube

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