Coffee drinks, what can you say about coffee drinks? Well, I can say that I don't often drink them since I don't usually drink booze before, say, noon, and I don't usually drink coffee after 2pm. However, I make an exception for the Arab Strap and indulge in a little coffee in the afternoon when I am not required to fall asleep at a reasonable hours. And, so it was the Sunday before Memorial Day. With a day off the next day and staring at a Silicon Valley binge watching evening I brewed up a cup of coffee, added some rum, warmed up a Marionberry crumble added ice cream and sat down to wallow in the decadence of it all.
This recipe came from the 12 Bottle Bar, but I have tweaked it slightly.
Directions
The 12 Bottle Bar calls for you to crack the cardamom pods and add them, the sugar, the coffee and the twist of orange to a small sauce pan and bring the coffee to a boil, but I found that to give the coffee a burnt taste. So, I simply add all of the ingredients to a coffee mug and make the coffee right in the mug using an Aeropress® and topping it off with some boiling water. The purpose of boiling the coffee in the 12 Bottle Bar version is to bring out more of the cardamom taste and infusing the drink with more of the orange, and it is effective, but, in the end, the burnt coffee nullified the advantages for me. I let the drink sit and cool for a bit and the flavors were as pronounced as it was after boiling. Like most things in life, patience is the key.
The 12 Bottle Bar version also calls for an ounce of rum, but I have doubled that to give it a little bit more of a kick and it seems to balance quite nicely in a larger coffee cup.
We had our afternoon coffee drink with a nice helping of Marionberry crumble and a scoop of pure vanilla ice cream. This was probably as close as you can get to heaven in an afternoon without actually dying. My mouth is watering just thinking about it!
