DIY Frappucino - my version
I've never been much of a hot coffee drinker, but there's something about Starbucks Frappucinos©®™ that I crave first thing in the morning. (Elizabeth gets her morning bottle and I get mine.) Paying two bucks a bottle for the stuff is a bit much, so I went in search of a do-it-yourself (DIY) Frappucino recipe.What I found is that Frappucinos are (duh) mostly milk, flavored with a little bit of coffee and a lot of sugar. The most-referenced recipe I found on the web is this one from the Kurths. It calls for twelve ounces of coffee, six cups of whole milk, and a full cup of sugar. The resulting mix may taste a lot like bottled Frappucino but it seemed like a lot of calories to me. I decided to experiment a bit on my own to see how much I could cut back on the dairy and sugar while still making something close enough to Fraps to drink on a daily basis.
The first thing to go was the full cup of sugar. I started out with a half-cup of sugar, but even that was a bit much, especially when combined with the chocolate syrup I used to make the Fraps of the mocha persuasion. It was like drinking chocolate milk with a bit of coffee flavoring. Eventually I settled on half that amount, and then replaced it with Splenda. The sugar in the chocolate syrup keeps it from tasting too "diet," and I don't miss the calories.
Next up: the whole milk. One percent proved to be too thin; the Fraps were just too watery. I stepped up to two percent, which was perfect. Perhaps not as creamy as the bottled stuff, but pretty good. I tried using pectin as someone on the Kurths site suggested to thicken things up, but all of the boxes of pectin I found include citric acid to help the pectin set. The citric acid really taints the flavor of the Frappucino - it's like drinking coffee and orange juice at the same time. Bleearrgh. If anyone has tips on how to thicken these up a little bit without affecting the taste or adding a bunch of steps, let me know in the comments.
After a few weeks of playing with the mix, here's the recipe I settled on:
Hardware:
5 Frappucino bottles (an excuse to buy the real thing - caps and bottles are dishwasher safe)
one funnel
plastic pitcher for mixing
large spoon for stirring
coffee maker
large measuring cup
Software:
12oz brewed coffee
6 cups 2% milk
1/4 cup sugar or Splenda
5 tsp (give or take) Hershey's chocolate syrup
Brew coffee - I usually just use whatever is left over from Christina's morning coffee, which she brews pretty strong.
Mix coffee, sweetener, and milk in pitcher. Stir with spoon to mix well.
Put approximately 1 tsp chocolate syrup in the bottom of each Frappucino bottle. I just eyeball this straight from the Hershey bottle - measuring is too much trouble.
Use the funnel to fill each bottle with the coffee mixture. Seal each bottle well. Don't bother shaking the bottles to mix the syrup now - every bottle of mocha Frappucino I've ever seen has the chocolate at the bottom, so I assume it just settles out in the fridge. Chill in fridge.
Makes enough to fill the five bottles with a little left over.
Even grossly overestimating the cost of coffee and Splenda, I figure this costs at most fifty cents a bottle to make (realistically it's more like thirty cents). Way better than two bucks, and it takes about ten minutes to do.
Next I need to figure out how to do these:
Though jeez, what do I do about those cute cans?
Labels: cooking
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