Coffee Beans at Home, episode 1

With the days getting colder and colder, G and I are becoming more and more reluctant to leave home in the evenings. And so I have devised a few additional stops along the Coffee Beans Trail, very conveniently located in our own well-worn out armchairs (they are from the peak of the Communist era, from the deep and dark cave of the 1970s, so we like to pat their frayed edges and crevices, and call them vintage).

So I figured that in times when you're too scared to blink outside for fear that your eyes freeze shut, we'd use this cosy corner of our flat as a funky cafe (complete with a screaming parrot eyeing us from the kitchen counter), and a testing ground for whatever ideas we could further explore in a real cafe of our own one day... As we indulge ourselves in treats to ease ourselves into winter, I shall pass on to you whatever it is that our taste buds say!

The December special of the Frayed Armchair Cafe can only be one thing:




Gingerbreads! They are all made from the same dough, but I swear that hearts and teddy bears taste best of all.

A while ago we also received samples of Douwe Egberts coffee, so we gave it a go to see how it would get along with a crunchy browned pal as a sidekick. Using our professional cafe equipment, we fixed G a strong espresso from the Black variety, and I got a fluffy chocolate-freckled latte from the Gold variety.



The coffee is a steady, delicate flavour, very smooth on the palate, and as such, makes for a very good morning latte (particularly the Gold variety, which is more mellow), or a really solid basis for your syrup-infused coffees. And it is certainly the best you can get in its price range on the Polish market (11 PLN, 2.5 EUR). However, I must say that fans of rich aromas will not find this coffee particularly remarkable. It lacks in this wonderful quality that good coffee shares with wine; that it can open up, sip after sip, giving up nuances of its flavour.

But then, it turns out that a mild coffee like this stands up very well to an experiment for which, I believe, I would be publicly shot in some coffee-worshipping countries. I mixed up a small dose of it with ground cinnamon, brewed a nice cupful, and smothered it with fluffy milk. It tasted divine! I never thought it was going to work, I somehow imagined that the cinnamonny flavour wouldn't quite brew through. It did! And yes, I will probably be trying to cinnamon-up everything I try all throughout the season.