Day 94 Andrea's tutorial for making your own Starbucks Latte

I LOVE Starbucks Vanilla Lattes.  Unfortunately the nearest Starbucks to me is about 6 hours south of me :(

After hosting an Epicure party last week and my good friend Carrie buying me a milk frother at it, I decided to give making my own a try.

It can't be that hard can it?

First thing I discovered was that there was no where up here in this deserted land in the north to buy coffee syrup from. Yes I could have ordered it online but why not make my own?

So here we go, the Andrea tutorial for making your OWN Starbucks syrups and making a vanilla latte :)

First up the cast of Characters.

1 Cup water ( I think most of us have that!)

1 cup white sugar ( you can make it a skinny latte buy making the syrup with sugar supplement if you want)

1 vanilla bean (or you can also use a big heaping tablespoon of vanilla extract, but please for goodness sake don't use artificial stuff)

That's all folks!  Pretty simple eh?

Okay so your first step is take one of those lovely vanilla beans and split it open length wise so all those gooey insides get into the syrup and add lots of flavour.

Then in a sauce pan add your water, sugar and vanilla bean ( or extract if you don't want to live on the wild side)

Stir it together and heat it up on medium high heat and let it boil. You want to stir it every once in awhile so it doesn't burn.  Let it cook for about 20 minutes or so until it becomes thick and syrupy.

When it looks nice and yellow with black specs ( that's the yummy vanilla) then take it off and let it cool.

I poured mine into a glass jar after a few minutes to let it cool there. 

At this point you can either take the vanilla beans out or run it through a strainer and get any big chunks of your vanilla bean out. 

Put it into an airtight container and it will be good in the fridge for about a month ( if it lasts that long!)

Now do you really want to go nuts?

How about a different flavour?

Cinnamon Dulce Latte anyone?

Just change around a few ingredients and you can make that too!

 1 cup of water

1 cup of brown sugar

1.5 teaspoons of ground cinnamon ( you can use more or less depending on how much cinnamon you like)

And just for kicks I threw in the vanilla bean shells from the first batch to let some of that flavour soak in.

Do the same thing as above and let it cook till its syrupy. 

(I doubled this recipe)

Now you have some coffee syrup!

Okay so now you are asking what do I do with this stuff?

Easy peasy....I don't have my milk frother yet so I did it the hard way, which really is not hard at all.

Grab some milk( I used Lactaid free 1%, but whatever you have on hand) , add a little of your syrup and stir it up.    I used about 3/4 of a cup of milk and a tablespoon of syrup and had enough for about 4 lattes. But you can adjust this to how much you want and how sweet you want it.

Put it in the microwave for about 4 minutes, you want it to get nice and steamed. 

Grab your electric mixer and start beating it till it gets nice and frothy. (About 3 minutes or so)

Do you have your coffee ready?

Some people use espresso but hey I'm a simple woman and just use my regular old Folgers in a plain old coffee maker.

Take your mug and pour some of that nice frothy milk in, then fill the rest of the mug up with coffee :)  You can even add a bit more foam on top if you want!

Hello Vanilla Latte!!!!  Mmmmmm.  I think I may be on caffeine overload now.

And this is a WAY cheaper alternative to a 4 dollar latte from Starbucks.

Please ignore my last picture saying Day 95,  I got a little confused with all that coffee in my system and put the wrong day on.   I am on Day 94....Day 95 may possibly be more picture of my coffee though :)

I hope you enjoyed my tutorial that has nothing whatsoever to do with anything camera related.  Go on, give it try, you know you want to!