First, blogfriend Brian Raymond pointed me to this Satanic coffee from Geekologie:

I can only assume the barista sweetened it with the blood of infants and added the milk of murderous cows for colour, yet still referred to it as black coffee.

Next, in this old post of mine about butter in coffee, a commenter named Nathan linked to this article about HOW TO MAKE YOUR COFFEE BULLETPROOF. Spoiler alert: you put butter in it.

I’ve done this a few times before. Butter Chicken Coffee Minus Chicken was not too shabby, but Cafe Benedict caused involuntary convulsions. This David Asprey fellow recommends unsalted butter, which would probably be bearably delicious.

He also goes a bit further, claiming that this coffee provides “level energy” for 6 hours, “programs the body” to burn fat, and will “make you feel Bulletproof” (yes, with a capital B). These claims seem to come from the “I made this shit up because it sounds cool” school of nutrition rather than, you know, science, but hey, whatever it takes to justify chugging butter. I wouldn’t recommend testing the Bulletproof claim, however. Placebos don’t work so good against bullets.

I’m working on some, um, interesting coffee creations. I will be back to write about them when I have time. By the way, buying stuff from the PWTIC store or leaving a tip, on that sidebar to the right there, would really inspire me to hurry my butt up. Hiiint.

See also: Optimum Biopower Xtreme Coffee.

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 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!

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.

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.

As the ancient Chinese proverb goes, “if you blog it, they will come.”

The finest purveyors of bread cheese on this continent seems to be Carr Valley, based in Wisconsin. Monica Wright, a Minneapolis reporter, read my post and got in touch with me. Minnesota happens to be close to Wisconsin, and being pretty much the awesomest person in the world, Monica offered to send me some Carr Valley cheese for testing.

You can read Monica’s scoop over on Hot Dish, featuring an interview with yours truly (warning: contains Cheese Week spoilers). Keep reading for a more detailed analysis of the experiment.

Well, this is the first cheese I’ve seen that actually recommends dipping it in coffee right on the package.

The cheese took two weeks to arrive. There was a chance that after two weeks in an unrefrigerated truck, it could have gone nasty. Only one way to find out, though.

The brown spots are supposed to be there, and there were no other visible deformities, so that’s a good sign. I sliced a good sized finger of cheese, then poked it right into some nice hot, strong coffee.

Damn! This is good!

I’m not a cheese connoisseur, so I don’t have the pallet or vocabulary to fully describe this. It’s got the saltiness of feta, the “squeaky” texture of mozzarella, and just a hint of that pungent blue cheese taste. Dipping it in the coffee doesn’t melt it, but mellows it out, making it less crumbly, more rubbery. The coffee seems to soak in just a bit, adding an earthiness that wasn’t there in Carr Valley’s solo effort.

When the cheese was gone (far too quickly), the coffee was left with a bit of an oily film, but the taste was otherwise unaffected.

This has a lot of potential. Stay tuned for further experiments in the coming week.

Bacon was first placed into coffee.

Researcher proceeded to hold bacon up to light while laughing maniacally.

Bacon and coffee were then placed into Magic Bullet apparatus and blended for 10 seconds (or less). No cream was added. The mixture took on a creamy colour and texture. Repeat: no cream was added.

Researcher became nervous; began to exhibit signs of distress such as sweating and trembling hands.

Despite further blending, chunkage was apparent. Given previous encounters with chunks, researcher became visibly agitated. After several minutes of contemplation and pacing, he exclaimed “[expletive deleted], I’ve got it,” produced a coffee filter, and set up another apparatus.

Coffee was poured through (another) filter in order to remove chunks. Coffee had taken on thick texture and required manual squeezing in order to drain into mug. Researcher became covered in oily coffee.

Yield was small, but enough to gauge properties of coffee. Filtering was successful; no chunks were detected. The texture was, however, slimey. Taste was not terrible. Smokiness of bacon came through, as did saltiness. However, the researcher was left unsatisfied, expressing a desire for an idealized bacon coffee that he claimed to “have dreamed about nightly,” yet also added, “I will not rest until I find it.”

Further research is needed.

Footnote: The unfiltered, chunk-laden coffee was also attempted. Not recommended. Taste was similar to Cafe Benedict, except chewier.

Readers with strong stomachs may wish to observe the residue.

This research was funded by two generous organizations: Klix offers spiffy coffee vending kiosks, while Flavia offers smaller bean to cup coffee machines. Those certainly look better than vending machines where I’ve worked. The sludge that came out of those didn’t need weird things to taste weird.