Iced Coffee

Starbucks, I don't need you anymore!  Okay, that's overstating things... Starbucks, I need you slightly less :-)

I love an iced coffee, all frothy and full of caffeine.  But the recipes for the blended coffee drinks all called for cold coffee which I never had on hand in the morning.  So I've been working on creating a supply of coffee ice cubes with the leftover coffee in the morning.  Believe it or not, the ice cube trays cleaned up nicely and weren't stained.

So this morning I experimented with Megan.  I used about a cup of Silk light vanilla soy milk, about a tablespoon of chocolate syrup, and about 2 cups of the coffee ice cubes.

I started out using the frozen dessert setting.  I needed to use the tamper to push the ice cubes into the blades.

Everything was blended very nicely, but I thought it looked a little thick. I added another half cup of soy milk and ran it through the smoothie setting (a slightly shorter blend cycle).

This created the perfect consistency, but it also created a lot more than I really needed!  (Poor Richard isn't home, so I guess I'll have to drink the whole thing all by myself!)

Even though this recipe ended up having a higher ratio of soy milk to coffee, the ice cubes really have a concentrated coffee taste, so it was nicely balanced.  If you're using regular milk I imagine you would need to sweeten the drink in some way, but maybe the hit of chocolate syrup would be enough.

All in all this experiment was a success!  I should be bouncing off the walls any moment now...