Enjoy the rich and bold flavor of a classic espresso with a touch of creamy steamed milk.

Ingredients: 1 shot of espresso. 1/2 ounce of steamed milk.

Instructions: Grind the coffee beans until they are very fine. Press the coffee grounds down hard into the portafilter. Take out one shot of espresso, which is about one ounce, and pour it into a shot glass. First, steam half an ounce of milk until it foams up. Then, pour it over the espresso shot.

Prep Time: 5 minutes

Cook Time: 2 minutes

Analysing our Autumn menu, and attempting to generate new ideas to make our food and drink selection more exciting, I scrolled through pages and pages on coffee, recipes, international influences on food, espresso ideas and the list goes on. Researching for words and articles to trigger ideas in my head usually leads to outright procrastination and generates zero results. But today I came across a site that engaged my interest and that yes lead to utter procrastination but also to me blogging about it, because I utterly believe the unique and quirky site has an immense worth of sharing.

  ‘Putting Weird Things in Coffee’ is a blog ran by Canadian university student, Mike or Dr Phronk, displaying his sometimes good sometimes horrendous experiments with coffee, putting everything from smoked salmon cream cheese (“dissolves into a curdled-cream texture, bad idea”) to bacon in his coffee (“time-saving and delicious”), because as he puts it “I drink coffee every day, but get bored with the same old cream and sugar.” Deciding to document his discoveries “for the benefit of all mankind” with categories such as “really weird,” “disgusting failures” and “cheese,” and despite the negative testimonials stating “how dull is life must be to get that bored” Putting Weird Things in Coffee makes for quite a comical, likeable blog, in my opinion anyway.

One of my favourite posts is “Low Fat whipped dressing in coffee” which starts off by planning to mix mayonnaise with coffee, but as a result of having no mayonnaise and it being two expensive, Phronk goes with the ‘next, next’ best thing. He writes about a previous suggestion for the “eggspresso” and “since the dressing has egg in it” he goes with the previous suggested technique. The conclusion of the experiment has Phronk reporting how it tasted; “Oh. Oh my god. The moment it enters my mouth, I know that something has gone wrong. It’s sour; oh Jesus, it’s like acid burning my tongue. In the name of science, I take another sip. No yeah, this is the closest I’ve come to chugging vomit. Somehow it’s even worse than blue cheese dip. I should have gone with Doritos”

The site provides plentiful entertaining reports on some very creative and courageous coffee concoctions that I thoroughly enjoyed reading about and I can’t wait to make our new drinks menu :)