Cooking with Teenagers: Fancy Coffee Drinks

 Sometime during the pandemic, one of my kids became a coffee drinker.

She's a teenager, so it's not, like, "real" coffee, or rather, not anything like the black coffee that I drink out of my French press every morning. Instead, her mid-morning coffee break consists of a carefully crafted beverage that does contain a goodly amount of either instant coffee or cold-brew, but also has so much sugar and milk in it that when she sometimes makes me a cup, too, because she's a generous kid, it tastes exactly like coffee candy in liquid form.

I don't know, you guys. Was I supposed to forbid her coffee until she's all grown up? I feel like maybe I was, but ugh. There is just so much to remember about being a parent! 

Anyway, it's more fun to find fancy coffee drinks on social media and make them with her.

Whipped coffee was definitely our gateway drink.

As much as I have the sinking sensation that I ought to be discouraging my growing child from polluting herself with caffeine, it IS pretty fun to have the love of fancy coffee drinks in common with her, and I do keep an eye out for delicious-looking recipes to try with her.

I mean, I would NEVER go to all the trouble to make myself, alone, a fancy coffee drink, not when black coffee is so quick and easy and gives me that same knot of anxious energy in the pit of my stomach. But when I make a fancy coffee drink with my teenager? Well, that's just us bonding!

Here's the latest recipe that we tried:

Watch on TikTok

We made it a little too sweet--

--but look how deliciously frothy it got! Definitely going to try the shaken coffee method again:

And look how it encourages the teenager to drink her (free public school) milk! Yay, calcium!

Ooh, this was another really good recipe:

I even bought peppermint syrup for this! Syd doesn't always love chocolate, so for hers we used this salted caramel sauce instead of chocolate (and skipped the peppermint, I think? Peppermint and salted caramel don't seem like they'd be friends), although now that I'm thinking of it I bet we could substitute homemade dulce de leche. 

And because I was IN A MOOD, I found a totally different recipe that told me how I could make homemade whipped cream in my cocktail shaker, and then I did it, and then our gorgeous chocolate peppermint/salted caramel coffees were both beautiful AND delicious!

The mess that they made in the kitchen was less so...

But whatever. One thing that I now know about pandemics is that they leave plenty of time for housecleaning!

P.S. If you're doing a better job of keeping your teenagers away from caffeine than I am, I highly recommend DIY hot chocolate bombs as another great cooking with teenagers project!