Coffee!!!

It’s time for a coffee blog. Yes, this week’s flavour is a Ben and Jerry's one and is called “Coffee coffee, buzz buzz buzz.” I am a big fan of coffee and I thought that we’d trying making a few different things with coffee this week. I will try out a couple of iced versions, some homemade iced and warm latte, and a dessert with coffee in it.

With Summer in full swing, I was feeling quite warm even first thing in the morning while I was sipping my hot coffee so I decided to try out a few iced cold coffee drinks to kick off my day. 

First of all I tried one that crushed up the ice like a Frappuccino.

*For all of these coffees, you’ll want to make your coffee stronger than usual so that you get better flavour when it gets diluted with ice/water (maybe cut the water in half; I usually do equal parts grounds and water when I make my regular morning coffee).

Blend about 1 ½ - 2 cups of ice cubes crushed up. Add ¾ cup of brewed strong coffee that is cooled along with ½ cup of milk/cream. If you want to, you can add some sugar (I prefer mine without) and a few drops of vanilla.

I also made one with whole ice cubes which I like better (see above pictures for the first steps). You can keep it real simple or make it a bit fancier. I made one with instant coffee in which you will need ½ cup of hot water and 2 tsp. of instant coffee, let cool. Then blend it with ¼ cup of cream and 1 tsp. of vanilla and pour over ice. If you make it with regular brewed coffee then blend a cooled 1 cup of coffee along with 1 tsp. of vanilla, 2-4 tbsp. of half and half and then pour over ice.

I love lattes, but they can be expensive and have a lot of calories, so these are some easy at home lattes that you can try.

For an iced latte try brewing 1/3 cup of coffee with 2 cups of cold water. Combine the brewed and slightly cooled coffee with 1 can of sweetened condensed milk and serve over ice. This makes lots of coffee so if you only want some then refrigerate some and pour over ice when you are ready to drink it.

For a warm latte, I kind of used the method that we did when we made London Fogs a while back. Start by brewing some really strong coffee. 

Pick the mug you want and then fill it half way up with milk or cream and pour into a saucepan. Then whisk constantly while it simmers on the stove (make sure you don’t boil). 

Fill your mug/mugs up with coffee half way, add a bit of vanilla, this is where you’d add syrup or sugar if you like it, and then when you have a nice foam on your milk that you are whisking, pour the milk into the coffee and top with the foam. You can sprinkle with cocoa or cinnamon.

Ok, so another must try and a must try that is at the top of my list, are these Oreo cookie ice cubes. Simply crush up some Oreo’s and line them in the bottom of some ice cube trays and top with the milk of your choice. Once they have frozen, add them to your morning coffee, iced or warm!

Coffee dessert time! We’ve been talking about different ways to drink coffee but now we thought we’d try a dessert with coffee as the main ingredient. Nicole isn’t a coffee fan so I have been testing out the drinks so far and have been taking over this blog and I’ll do the same for this dessert but maybe I can try and convince her to have some. I have chosen to make chocolate chip coffee cookies. These have a really nice strong coffee flavour; it’s not so much mocha like some coffee chocolate combos, you can definitely taste the coffee and chocolate separately.

Chocolate Chip Coffee Cookie Recipe:

You will need...

½ cup of butter

½ cup of granulated sugar

¼ cup of brown sugar

1 egg

4 tbsp. of instant coffee granules

1 tbsp. of water

2 cups of flour

1 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. of cornstarch

½ tsp. of baking soda

¼ tsp. of salt

1 cup of chocolate chips

Start by preheating your oven to 350 degrees.

Whisk the flour, powder, soda, cornstarch, some of the coffee granules, and salt.

Then almost melt the butter in the microwave and pour into mixing bowl. Mix in the sugars and then the egg until combined.

Dissolve the  rest of the instant coffee into the water and then add to the wet ingredients.

Now add in the dry ingredients slowly until completely mixed and then stir in the chocolate chips.

You can roll balls of dough and place on the cookie sheet for a more polished look or you can scoop the dough. It’s up to you.

Bake for 8-10 minutes.

Allow to cool a bit before removing from the sheet.

Wedding Cake Card

It’s wedding season, well at least near the end of wedding season and we have a fun and easy wedding cake card that is inspired by the Brusters Wedding Cake ice cream flavour. We have made a similar card like this in the past but have never blogged about it. We’re making two versions, a simple rustic one and one that’s more elegant and colourful. You don’t need fancy machines for this card and you don’t even need to stamp!

Gather some supplies to get started. You’ll need some cardstock. For our rustic card, we’ve gone with a cream coloured “cake” and greens and red for the rest of the card. For the more elegant card, we chose a white “cake” and then blue and a pinky purple colour.

We’ve cut the cards to the usual 6 ¾ x 4 ¾ inch size.

Then we have layers measuring 6 ¼ x 4 ¼ inches.

Then we cut out our cake tiers. The top is 1 ½ x 2, the middle is 2 ¼ x 2 ¼, and the bottom tier is 3 ¼ x 2. If you have a machine like a Silhouette then feel free to use it to do your cutting.

Next we glued the layers on overlapping them while doing so and then glued that layer onto our cards.

Lastly, to elevate the cards a bit, we added some embellishments. Feel free to make it as elaborate as you want and you can add some stamping, ribbon, embellishments, etc. whatever you like. We started with ribbon on both.

On the more elegant colourful card we added a bow topper on top along with simple white sparkly flower embellishments.

On our rustic simple card we added a ribbon bow on top and matching thin brown ribbon between the tiers of the cake. We left it at that to keep it simple as possible but it still has a finished feel.

There you have it, two really simple to make wedding cake cards.

Banoffee Pie

This week’s flavour is Banoffee by Häagen Dazs. I have wanted to try Banoffee pie for the past six years, that’s when I went to England and everybody there raved about this dessert and would eat it when we went out for dinners. I didn’t try it because of the nut allergy that I have but it looked so delicious; now is the perfect time to finally make it!

It’s actually a really easy process to make Banoffee pie; I thought that it would be more complicated just from what it looked like when I saw people eating it in England.

First of all, you are going to make the crust. Line a 9 inch springform pan with parchment paper.

Ground up graham wafers in the food processor so that you have 1 ¼ cup of crumbs. Pour 8 tbsp. of melted butter over the crumbs and mix well.

Press the crumbs over the bottom and up 1 ½ inches of the sides of the pan. Put in the fridge.

Now to make the toffee sauce! Combine ½ cup of brown sugar along with 3 tbsp. of water in a medium sized sauce pan on medium; stir until the sugar dissolves.

Raise the heat and boil without stirring until the syrup is a deep amber colour.

Stir in 1 ¾ cups of sweetened condensed milk and ½ cup of butter and stir until the sauce thickens, about 5 minutes.

Remove the sauce from the heat and spread 1 cup of the sauce over the crust that has been in the fridge and then put back in the fridge for about an hour or until the sauce is semi-firm. Keep the remaining sauce at room temperature.

For the pie filling, beat 1 ¼ cups of heavy cream until thick and soft peaks form. Slice three bananas into very thin discs and fold them into the whipped cream.

Spoon the filling into the crust on top of the toffee sauce layer.

Slice two more bananas this time a bit thicker and arrange decoratively over the top of the pie.

Rewarm the remaining toffee sauce and drizzle over the top of the pie.

Cut and serve with more toffee drizzle on top.

Yum!