In The Kitchen with Laura McKenna: International Coffee Day Tips & Tricks

On Sunday, we celebrated National Coffee Day. Today is International Coffee Day. To all of us coffee lovers, every day is coffee day!

Here’s a few tips and tricks to be an at home barista with minimal skills and even less effort.

COFFEE ICE CUBES
I am an old school 12-cup coffee pot type of coffee brewer (no fancy single serve machines in this house). What I do is: drink about half the pot and then put the remaining coffee in a container in the fridge for making iced coffee later in the afternoon.

I like my iced coffee loaded with iced cubes, too. The downside of that: as the ice cubes melt, they water down the coffee. So here’s what you do: Take some of that leftover coffee and fill your ice cube tray with it. Then once frozen, empty the Coffee Cubes into a ziploc bag and keep them at the ready in the freezer.

**Warning** This will startle whoever is the next person to grab that ice cube tray out of the freezer without knowing you’re making Coffee Cubes. Imagine reaching for regular ice and getting quite the surprise when you pull out a tray of black cubes. Quite shocking. So even a little post-it note (to remind yourself or the people who share your kitchen) that “Coffee Cubes are being made” will help so they don’t end up being thrown on the floor in a fright!

MAPLE SYRUP
This little trick came about by desperation. While doing a morning radio show in Green Bay many years ago, my co-host and I would take turns bringing the flavored coffee creamer into the station for the two of us to use. One morning, we realized we had run out! Steve (my former co-host) said he’d just use the powdered creamer and sugar in the company kitchen but I can’t drink it like that. So I started rooting around the in the fridge to see what I could find. Leftover from the day before, there sat a tub of maple syrup that a restaurant had brought with their pancakes and crepes for all the staff to sample.

So I added some maple syrup to my coffee and it was actually really good! Now, some days I’ll skip the french vanilla or caramel creamer on purpose and just add a splash of cream and maple syrup. Yum!

Want to contact Laura McKenna about some coffee recipes or tricks you do? Anything else on your mind? Email anytime, she’d love to hear from you: [email protected]
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