Awesome Autumn Afternoon Fika
I had the best of intentions to have a recipe to share to knock your socks off. However, it isn’t quite ready yet. It is good, but not as good as it could be.
As you know doubt are aware if you’ve been following me for any length of time I adore anything pumpkin - bread, muffins, butter, donuts, milkshakes, blizzards, soup, even just the color. Thus I am also hopelessly addicted to Starbuck’s Pumpkin Spice Latte which returned at the beginning of the month. Since I’ve been making my own chai concentrate and have made a few other flavored syrups for coffee and Italian sodas I thought it was time to try replicate this $4+ drink at home for much less.
I have the espresso machine (thanks Sarah for the great deal!). We have wonderfully fresh and local milk. We have a fantastic food co-op which saves us *tons* of money on the spices and raw sugar that goes into it and it is all organic! I did some research and there are many recipes out there on how to make a pumpkin spice latte at home. Most are a one time, one or two latte deal. But Sugarcrafter has a recipe for syrup which can be stored in the fridge was more in the direction I was wishing to go. So I used that as a jumping off point.
To try keep “grit” to a minimum I opted to go for more whole spices, using whole cloves and all spice, cinnamon chips, plus slices of fresh ginger and a small nub of nutmeg that our nutmeg grinder can’t grate. I also opted to use some of last year’s pumpkin butter in place of the plain pumpkin puree just for ease. All my pumpkin puree is currently in the frozen state and I was unable to liberate just a small amount. I used raw sugar to add the slight hint of molasses and to keep the sugar refinement down.
Ultimately, the end result is good, but very subtle. It made a nice afternoon fika when paired with a slice of pumpkin chocolate chip bread. I think with the whole spices I need to approach it much more like I do my chai concentrate, heating the spices and water up without the sugar and letting them simmer and steep for much longer. Fortunately I did not make a huge batch so I should be able to give it another go by next week I think. I may find I went a little light on the syrup on the first latte too. We’ll have to see.
