9 Of The Best Coffee Hacks To Perk Up Your Cup Of Joe

Chucking just milk and sugar in your coffee is old news. Now, people all over the interweb are using a whole load of other ingredients to create beautiful flavours and textures with their cuppa. Get ready for these…

Chocolate Peanut Butter Frappuccino

Peanut butter, with its sweet, roasted flavours, works brilliantly with coffee. Add in some chocolate and it gets even better. Amy’s Healthy Baking has this gorgeous skinny chocolate peanut butter frappuccino recipe that uses powdered peanut butter to reduce the calories. Amy says it should work with regular peanut butter blended in instead, but then it wouldn’t really be ‘skinny’.

Paleo Gingerbread Coffee

Heard about ‘bulletproof’ coffee? It’s a regular black coffee blitzed with a fat like coconut oil or butter. It’s said to give you more energy as well as taste great. It’s advisable to blend the fat into the coffee so that you get a frothy coffee rather than just oily butter floating on top, which doesn’t look as appetising. Stupid Easy Paleo has developed this gingerbread spice coffee - go check it out.

Lavender Honey Iced Latte

Lavender and coffee? We didn’t see that coming. This little number was created by Sarah of the blog Offbeat and Inspired after she bought a lavender plant and set to work using the “unique, sweet, comforting aroma” in her cooking. So she made a lavender honey iced latte.

Pakistani Coffee with Cinnamon and Cardamom

Cardamom - those little green pods you sometimes find in your Indian curries and rice dishes - is a perfect match for coffee. It has a sweet and slightly citrussy flavour which lifts dark, rich coffee tones. Sasha, who writes at the blog Global Taste Adventure made this coffee flavoured with cardamom and cinnamon after being inspired by the spiced, frothy coffees served in Pakistan.

Toasted Coconut Coffee Smoothie

Bored of the usual fruit smoothies? Kare at the blog Kitchen Treaty came up with this toasted coconut coffee smoothie after making a non-coffee version first. “The first one was unleaded,” she writes. “This one: leaded. All the way.” It’s made by blitzing coconut milk, dried coconut and other ingredients with frozen coffee ice cubes.

Vietnamese ‘Bubble’ Coffee

You know bubble tea, with those little tapioca balls at the bottom of the cup? Well New York-based writer Diana Kuan blogged about a coffee version, at Appetite for China. She says that bubble tea “kills two birds with one stone” - the liquid tea and then the tapioca pearls as a sort of snack.  But her Vietnamese coffee boba drink takes care of three. “If you need a cold drink, and afternoon snack, and a jolt of caffeine at the same time,” she writes.

Toasted Marshmallow Iced Coffee

Over to Nicole, from Confectionalism for this one - a toasted marshmallow iced coffee. The coffee is flavoured with vanilla - another perfect pairing with coffee - and there’s a marshmallow creme spooned over the top. Get the recipe from her blog and give it a try.

Spicy Mocha with Chocolate Whipped Cream

Imagine curling up on the sofa with a mug of this after a long day at work. Aly from Cooking in Stilettos created this spicy mocha with chocolate whipped cream spooned on top. She’s flavoured the drink with spicy dried red chillies and cinnamon. “Don’t you want a sip?” she writes. Er, yes, Aly, we do.

Pumpkin Spice Coffee

We don’t cook with pumpkin half as much as they do in the US. And this pumpkin spice coffee makes me wonder why that is. Pumpkin purée blended with coffee and warm, aromatic spices… sounds perfect to me. Get the recipe over at Dieters Downfall.
 
Have any of these inspired you to try anything new? Let us know over on Twitter.