Coffee Art

For all you coffee lovers out there -

  

Here's how you can be your very own coffee artist and impress your guest or just enjoy the play time for yourself.  Start from scratch by making your own cappuccino and go from there. 

      Pour up a cup of coffee or, better yet, espresso. Add to the cup some fresh steamed milk, leaving a bit of white milk foam in the center of the cup. The foam becomes the canvas for a coffee artist. There are many ways to create a piece of artwork on the top of that cup.

        Take a strainer that has a decorative design of holes and place it over the cup. Tap a shaker that contains cocoa powder or cinnamon onto the strainer so that the powder goes through the holes and lands on the top of the foam. Use this same technique on a cup of coffee and steamed milk and is a uniform brown color by using powdered sugar or vanilla sugar, which will leave a white design.

        Take a small pointed utensil like a toothpick and draw it into and out of the white foam region to form a design. Draw the toothpick into the white region from the corners of a five-pointed star. Draw the tip of the toothpick from the edge of the foam to the center of the foam. Now repeat the procedure by drawing from the center of the foam to beyond the outside edge of the foam region. This second time, be sure to draw the toothpick between each of the other lines that you have already placed in the foam. The foam now looks like there is a five-petal flower in the top of the cup.

        Add chocolate or caramel syrup to the procedure above to produce designs that have more color than just the foam and coffee. Adding one of these syrups to the foam region as a shape or simply a circle will add complexity to the designs that you can make.

I believe you could do this with hot chocolate also, for the kids.
And just maybe, you could utilize colorful sprinkles to add a holiday twist.

For 50 great designs, from simple to complex, click here.