Chocolate Hazelnut Assplosion
I had big plans for hot sauce. I dribble the stuff on everything I eat, so I have four different kinds in my fridge. A nice idea, I thought, would be to try the whole series of sauces in coffee, then have a post comparing them all, with an intricate rating system to help you, dear reader, choose the perfect hot sauce for your morning beverage.
Here is how those plans got derailed.
Assplosion was a lovely gift from my family. It’s not a great hot sauce; it’s spicy enough, but hadn’t really lived up to its name. Still, I had to try it first, to start this series with a “bang.”
The only coffee I had ready was chocolate-hazelnut flavoured. And you know how chocolate with chili in it is all the rage these days? I thought I’d enhance the chocolate with some Fry’s cocoa and go for that idea in drink form.
I’ve been watching Dexter a lot lately, which makes red drips remind me of blood. That was probably the first sign this wouldn’t turn out well.
When it was all mixed up, the smell was … alarming. It literally hurt my nose a bit, with the combination of bitter cocoa and noxious spice. Ah, but I had to try tasting it anyway. For you, dear reader. All for you.
All I could taste was the Assplosion. I only put a few drops in, but it overwhelmed the coffee, hazelnut, and chocolate such that all they did was add some bitterness and enhance the illusion that I was drinking poison. Or ass.
I want to give other hot sauces a chance. Maybe it’d be better with regular coffee and no chocolate. Maybe there is a sauce out there that can contribute to the pleasant coffee / spice balance I experienced with curry coffee. But I can’t bring myself to try any more; not any time soon.
Plus, I’m starting to feel a rumbling down below.
Putting Flowers in Coffee
I was at a lovely dinner party, when conversation turned (as it often does in my presence) to weird coffee. As we retired to the drawing room, the party’s host — a culinary master with experience in flavours both traditional and exotic — mentioned that she had procured a jar of an unusual beverage additive.
She could not risk her life by telling me which underground market in which Asian country she had smuggled the rare florets from. However, she did let me take some, in order to distill it into my own elixir.
I cannot read the codified script on the jar, but I am told these are dried flowers of some sort. They also appear to be shrunken. Although originally created to add zest and vitality to tea, my specialty is in the transmutation of coffee.
I used black coffee with a small dipper full of sugar.
I had trouble getting over the dead-June-bugs-in-a-puddle look, but once I did, the taste was not the least bit unpleasant. It was quite like sipping coffee among the flowers of a botanical garden. Or like putting a dab of perfume in your morning brew. Except less poisonous. I could feel my spirits lifting and my humours balancing almost immediately.
Perhaps for Valentine’s Day I will sprinkle my true love’s coffee with ground up rose petals. Wouldn’t that be romantic?
WOULDN’T IT?
P.S. I cannot explain the style this post is written in. Thanks to Vivian for the flower things. You can probably find dried rose buds(I think that’s what these are) wherever unusual foods are sold.
The Mojijoe
When I was in Cuba, I fell in love with the Mojito. Its mix of strong rum, sugar, lime, soda water, and fresh mint is a refreshingly refreshing drink to beat the summer heat.
But now, as hot summer days turn to cool fall nights, we’d rather have a drink that lights a fire within us rather than squelching the sun without. Can we keep the rummy minty goodness of a Mojito, but rejigger it into something toasty? How about a warm cup of Mojijoe?
First, get all your ingredients:
I started with the sugar (2ish tbsp), mint (4-5 leaves), and just a squirt of lemon juice. I didn’t have a muddler handy, so I used the back of a spoon to mash it together just enough to bruise the tasty oils out of the mint leaves.
I added the rum (1.5 oz) next, then stirred and mashed a bit more. I used dark rum rather than the usual white; I thought it would compliment the coffee better.
Then the coffee. Then stir.
But um, I wouldn’t recommend the fancy glass. Oww, poor fingers. I guess mugs have handles for a reason. Also, the mint leaves kinda get in the way. So you may want to use one of these deals:
After all that, how’s it taste? Good! With the rum and mint, it’s very reminiscent of a crème de menthe-based dessert coffee, except the fresh mint has a more authentic taste and smell. It’s very rich; a whole mug may be too much. However, just a few sips were enough to have the intended warmth-in-the-belly effect.
The Mojijoe is going in the success category.
Advanced Tim Tam Slam Techniques
LAST TIME ON PWTIC: A Tim Tam Slam ended in disaster, when our hero’s biscuit disintegrated into mush before it even had a chance.
Since then, the community has banded together, offering suggestions that could prevent this tragedy from ever happening again. Many people suggested that temperature was a key factor. So let’s just chill out and try a few new techniques.
Frozen Tim Tam with Hot Coffee:
Freezing a regular Tim Tam overnight was a definite improvement. Suckage increased by at least 1 or 2 sucks, so that a decent amount of Tim Tam flavoured coffee could be extracted before it all fell apart. Even after its messy death, some particularly cold spots remained intact.
Frozen Caramel Tim Tam with Iced Coffee:
Just biting off the corners, it was clear that there were some solid bits in the frozen caramel Tim Tam.
Oh wow, so many sucks! This biscuit refuses to go mushy. I hoovered 5 or 6 good squirts of coffee, and even after that it didn’t crumble, but just lost its ability to transport liquid.
Biting into it was not tooth-friendly. A solid skeleton of jagged caramel had kept the whole thing together, and the cold coffee had done nothing to soften it.
Using the frozen caramel kind and sucking up cold coffee is the best way to delay the senseless murder of Tim Tams.
The Tim Tam Slam
Wikipedia succinctly describes the Tim Tam Slam:
The Tim Tam Slam is the practice of drinking a hot beverage, e.g. hot chocolate, through a Tim Tam (a commercial biscuit).
Hey, coffee is a hot beverage!
Tim Tams are Australian, so I wasn’t sure I’d be able to find them. Thankfully, they seem to be as ubiquitous as Fosters’s, so I found them at a larger Canadian grocery store.
They had two kinds, regular and caramel, so obviously I got both. To prepare for the Tim Tam slam, you bite off opposite corners.
Then you dunk one end in the coffee and, quickly, clamp your mouth around other end and suck like you’ve never sucked before. The tricky part of this process—and probably the reason it’s called the Tim Tam Slam rather than the Tim Tam Leisurely Suckle—is that the whole thing immediately begins to disintegrate when the coffee hits it. You really only get one good suck in before it’s mush in your hands.
The caramel kind was harder to hoover through, but lasted a bit longer. Maybe a suck and a half. Plus the ribbon of caramel acts like a skeleton to keep the whole thing intact even after the slam, making it easier to eat.
So the whole experience doesn’t last long, but while it does, it is a sweet one. The coffee picks up chocolate and liquified biscuit as it travels, arriving in your mouth with burst of sugary goodness.
The rest of it often plops into the coffee unless you can catch it in time. This gives the coffee itself a very nice mocha flavour, and even the soggy bits at the bottom are not half bad. They can be spooned out for a tiramisu-type treat.
Just be sure to wash your hands before attempting this. You’re going to end up licking them, and you wouldn’t want them pre-flavoured with Cheeto dust and whatever other filth you usually have coating your grubby flesh mittens. Might wanna have a napkin nearby too. Especially if you plan on writing a blog post about it and don’t want your keyboard all sticky. Oops.
Anyway, I highly recommend this messy success. Tim Tams and coffee are a match made in Australia heaven.
Note: Sorry for the blurry pictures. I was forced to use my iPhone 3GS, since I can’t even afford an iPhone 4. Oh hey, look, you can buy merchandise over to the right there!
Twix
Twitterfriend Aaron McGowan tweeted that Twix + Coffee = delicious. I am never one to pass up proving someone right—or even better, wrong—so I gave it a shot.
Unfortunately, it was as delightful as you’d expect. The half-melted chocolate and coffee-soaked biscuit are an improvement over dry Twix.
I had already dunked and devoured both bars before thinking of this, but I wonder if it is possible to suck up the coffee through the biscuit after biting off both ends.
This would resemble the Tim Tam Slam, which is something I have always wanted to try, but Tim Tams seem to only be available in Australia. Anyone out there know of a way to procure a Tim Tam here in Ontario? Please tell me, and I will both love you forever and give you credit for what would surely be an embarrassingly messy post.
Update Aug 5th: I found Tim Tams (at Loblaw, go figure)! How come you guys never told me how good these are? Stay tuned; I’ll try them with coffee if I don’t eat them all on their own first.
CHEESE WEEK DAY 4: Oven Baked Bread Cheese
Ok, so Cheese Week turned into Cheese Three Days Then a Month Then Another Day. Sorry. Anyway, here’s more cheese coffee.
I still had some bread cheese left. I’d heard it’s good with brown sugar and cinnamon baked on. I had the brilliant idea of topping coffee with a layer of the cheese, topping that with cinnamon and sugar, broiling it in the oven, then having a lovely crust to sip the coffee through, giving it just a hint of the cheesey brilliance before finishing it off with a soon.
I soon realized that there was not a large enough slice of cheese left to cover the whole ramekin (yes that’s a real word; look it up), and it wouldn’t be much of a “crust” if it immediately sank to the bottom. Thus, I drafted up and implemented a complex cheese apparatus, with smaller bits of cheese acting as supports to keep the larger slice aloft.
Of course, now is when this cheese finally decides to get its melt on. It immediately collapsed to the bottom of the coffee.
Regardless of its structure, it smelled delicious. But, well, you put anything with cinnamon in an oven, and it’s going to smell great. Luckily, this lived up to its smell. I had to use a spoon, treating it more like soup than coffee, but oh what gooey goodness.
This reminded me a lot of French Onion soup, in texture and even in taste; it’s a bit less salty, more sweet, but it’s got that delightful soggy melted cheese flavour that the French refer to as merde fondu dans ma bouche.1
People with less adventurous pallets would probably be turned off by this unusual combination of flavours. But when you think about it, coffee, cheese, and cinnamon all have an earthy quality to them. In fact, next time I do this, I’ll leave out the sugar and add some cognac, further emphasizing that this works better as a soup than a dessert coffee.
All of these bread cheese experiments have been successful. I give it my serious recommendation. If juustoleipa isn’t available where you live (as it isn’t here), I’m sure other cheeses could be substituted. Swiss, Gruyere or emmenthal could have similar results. And as we saw, cheddar has its place in coffee.
Thanks again to Monica Wright for the bread cheese and continual awesomeness. And thanks to you, Internet, for your incoming suggestions. Got more? Got enough for a whole other week of coffee experiments? Send them in.
1 No they don’t.
