Homemade Honey Café Latté
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I'm a work from home Mom. Every stitch of our business is built right from within these walls. Blog posts are created while I'm lying in bed - books are written at my kitchen counter - emails are answered while I'm out in the garden. This life is our work and this cottage is our office. Hence the honey café latté. I take my 'office supplies' quite seriously. We are, after all, creating the 'good life' with all our messy imperfections right here. It came then, by no surprise, that we stocked our 'home office' with a two head Faema espresso machine. I mean, HELLO, we live in the Pacific Northwest. The coffee meca of the United States. There's hardly anything I love more than sitting down to a high quality café latté. As I sit and type, create, and write it brings inspiration and joy. It brings peace. It helps me to forget that four children need their thirteenth cup of milk and seventeenth serving of food at 8 am. It softens the edges of bad attitudes and allows this constantly-moving Mama to breathe. Breathing is important. I'm going to share with you my drink of choice. This is my special drink - not my average espresso that I drink in the mornings. No, this drink is reserved for those moments when my soul needs a little hug in the depth of the day. Those moments when I think to myself "Self, you can't make it any further. Sit down, curl up into fetal position, and cry."Self, go make yourself a homemade honey café latté. Pick yourself up by your bootstraps and move on. There are little humans that need you.
Honey Café Latté
You will need: - 1 to 1 1/2 cups of whole milk (organic, grass fed is best) - 1 tablespoon honey - 2 shots espresso (method to follow) 1. Pick out your favorite mug. The mug that makes you happy and puts it right with your soul. Mine was made just up the road by Al, an owner of a local winery and pottery master. It's my "flavorite" - as Georgia would say.2. Now we're going to grab our freshly home roasted espresso beans. And we're going to use those incredible beans to fill our espresso thing-y with freshly ground espresso. 3. Then, the 'tamping'. Pushing it down with a metal tamper that pressed the espresso into a nice little hockey puck of espresso. Harder tamp means the espresso shot will pull slower and in return, give more flavor. Too slow and the shot will taste burnt though, so tamp with caution. A lose tamp will make the shot pull too fast and the resulting café latté will be watered down and yucky. Let's pretend like we're coffee snobs and this is super, super important. But before we pull the shot... 4. We steam the milk with the milk wand on the espresso machine. Even smaller espresso machines offer this feature. The wand uses steam to... wait for it... steam the milk. The proper amount of foam to milk is personal taste - more foam is created by pulling the wand out further so that the steam hits closer to the surface of the milk, making bubbles. Too far out and the foam will be wet (read: big bubbles). Move the wand a little further in and the foam will be dry (read: small bubbles). I'm a dry foam kinda person. 5. Now that our milk is steamed, it's time to put it all together. A tablespoon of honey into a mug...Or two mugs because my husband is currently remodeling our kitchen and the man deserves a homemade honey café latté. I just let the spoon rest in the mug so that I can stir it together in the milk to dissolve the honey. 6. In goes the milk... fill the mug up about 3-quarters of the way up. Let the milk and honey mingle for a few seconds to warm it up so you can stir it easily. 7. And now, we pull that perfect shot that we worked so hard to tamp correctly:... and we pour that into our mug as well. We top the mug off with milk and we stir gently to combine. Oh yes, yes we do. Then we sit back and we try and remember when our hearts weren't quite as heavy from trying times and the intense mess of it all. We'll try and remember that to everything there is a season. And this season, it's about a homemade honey café latté that allows us to tuck our mind into something sweet, comforting, and beautiful. And then we'll share some with our hard working husband who is happily retexturing all the walls in the kitchen so that they look just-so and continues to labor over ripping up flooring, moving the washing machine around, building kitchen countertops, figuring out how to install a farmhouse sink, reframing in windows and that arched door I just had-to-have. The little moments of enjoying a honey café latté are what build up all our big moments. These teeny little pieces of our day comprise an entire day of lives - a day we'll never get to experience again. Might as well made it delicious. And Amen.