How I make my morning coffee ✧

Every morning, without fail, I have coffee. ☕️

I love waking up and having something to look forward to every morning (especially in winter).

I have such a sweet tooth, but I never put sugar in my coffee and I usually order cappuccinos because I love strong coffee. That is until sometime last year, when I was working out of cafes regularly, I got really into ordering Caramel Macchiatos at Starbucks. And I somehow managed to get Kevin hooked on them too (he was a previous non-coffee drinker so I consider this quite an achievement).

Despite how much we loved them, buying coffee was not sustainable or financially-wise (especially for a daily drinker like me) so we decided to see if we could recreate it at home.

To our surprise, we discovered that it is actually SO easy to make your very own Caramel Macchiato at home.

Spoiler: the key ingredient in a caramel macchiato is not caramel.

Thank you so much to the team at Quarterpast for kindly gifting me their coffee syrups to try! We’ve actually bought Quarterpast syrup several times from Woolworths before and genuinely love it. They also have a tea infusion and chocolate range!

A simple recipe:

Homemade caramel macchiato

The best part about making your coffee at home is that you can adjust the sweetness to your taste. The way we make our caramel macchiato’s is definitely not as sweet as Starbucks!

What you’ll need:

• 10-15ml Vanilla syrup (Quarterpast syrup’s are easily found in Woolworths or online)

• Your choice of milk

• Your choice of coffee (we’ve made this in the past with Nespresso capsules and a Moka pot before we got our espresso machine and they all work just as well!)

• Caramel syrup (optional)

Directions:

1. Measure and pour 15ml of vanilla syrup into a cup (we’re lazy now and we don’t measure anymore - we just eyeball the amount by pouring enough syrup to cover the base of the cup).

2. Prepare your espresso or however you make your coffee into the same cup.

3. Froth your milk and pour into your cup

4. If you’re feeling fancy, and want to replicate the look of Starbucks’ Caramel Macchiato, you can drizzle caramel syrup on top (we use Hershey’s caramel syrup because it’s the easiest to get). But totally optional. Your coffee will still taste the same, you’ll just miss out on that first sip of caramel foamy goodness…

5. Et voilà! Your coffee is ready. It’s that easy.

Note: even though Starbucks calls this drink a macchiato, it isn’t true to the original definition of a caffè macchiato (“marked” with a small amount of milk). Starbucks baristas will pour the espresso into steamed milk to ‘mark’ the milk but since it tastes the same either way, we just pour the milk into the coffee.

Thank you so much again to Quarterpast for sending me these coffee syrups to try and feature. (If you’re more of a tea drinker, you should definitely check out their tea infusions. It’s such an easy and unique way to have tea.) I tried Salted Caramel but I still prefer vanilla (salted caramel tastes closer to normal sugar in my opinion) - but can’t wait to try the other flavours, especially hazelnut!

I would love to know if you try this as well and how you adapt it to suit your taste!

P.S. Thanks to Kevin for being my hand model.

P.P.S. We’re still working on our latte art skills. We’re pretty terrible.

jess x

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