Jos Little Life

To kick off my new blog and era of “content creation” (I hate calling it that but I don’t know what else it could be called,) I started filming a series of videos about different coffees you can make at home. I have been challenging myself to not only make the coffees but also the syrups instead of buying all of the flavors from the store. Some syrups have been relatively easy, like my simple VANILLA SYRUP that has been on my old blog for over a year and was so good to be one of the first that I transferred to this website. However, this recipe wasn’t so easy. I have experimented with adding some kind of butter flavor to my coffee syrups since last winter but I could not figure out how to do it without butter extract. So, I finally caved and bought some and now the possibilities are endless!

This is around the time that “dot cakes” were becoming really popular. I acknowledge I’m a little behind on this trend, but last week I finally came up with a vanilla cake syrup recipe and used it to make a dot cake latte. Boy was I missing out! It quickly became one of my sister-in-law’s favorite lattes so I have been making this stuff almost nonstop and it is SO GOOD!

To make this, all you have to do is boil your water and sugar so that it thickens up a little bit, before reducing the heat and adding all of the necessary extracts. The main flavors I wanted to capture was the vanilla, and the cakeyness. I didn’t want to just use a cake extract because I would have no other reason to use that. Instead, I used vanilla bean extract, butter extract and just a teeny bit of almond to really make it taste like box cake mix. To make a latte with this I just add 1-2 tablespoons of this syrup to a shot of espresso and top it off with either hot or cold milk with ice. For the “dot cake” portion of this latte, I like to use whipped cream on top to display the rainbow nonpareils (the dot sprinkles) but you can also make some cold foam by frothing half and half with some more of the syrup.