Tips for baking with coffee

Think beyond coffee cake

While there’s nothing wrong with a good coffee cake, there are other baked recipes where coffee works just as well. Creme caramel and panna cottas both have sweet, creamy bases in which coffee would work wonders. Simply stir in a tablespoon or two of instant coffee or chilled espresso and continue on with the recipe. You can also use coffee as a flavour-booster of sorts in cakes. Even if you’re not making a coffee cake, adding coffee to chocolate cake, for example, can add a richer flavour and make it that much more chocolatey.
Get the recipe for mocha crème caramel here.

Shake up your tiramisu

Traditional tiramisu calls for dipping sponge biscuits into coffee, but if you’re after a new coffee-flavoured dessert, consider combining a tiramisu and pavlova into one great recipe. In this recipe, instant coffee becomes a syrup that forms part of the mascarpone filling, as well as a final topping. Making a coffee syrup is a great way to use up leftover brewed coffee, and you can use it to top ice cream, too.
Get the recipe for tiramisu pavlova here.

Make a coffee-flavoured icing

Instead of putting coffee IN the cake, why not try putting it ON TOP of it? In this insanely easy recipe, coffee is beaten into royal icing and used to top doughnuts, but you could use it to ice any sponge you like. You could also use it to top cinnamon buns for a more grown-up version.
Get the recipe for cinnamon doughnuts with coffee royal icing here.

Make an affogato-style ice cream

While we’ll always have a place in our hearts for affogato, the laid-back dessert in which espresso is poured over vanilla ice cream, we also love the ice-cream version. Next time you’re inspired to make ice cream, why not add a few tablespoons of coffee to the base to make a delicious coffee-infused batch?
Get the recipe for coffee ice-cream with honeycomb here.