Self-made Flavored Coffee

My personal cup of Hazelnut coffee,
with strawberry UHT milk added to
grant a strawberry flavor.

Ever went to your neighborhood café to fancy yourself a sip of smooth flavored latte, took one look at the price, and wished that you could whip one back home without leaving the comfort of your room and spending RMs just to satisfy your desire for flavored caffeine? Well, why don't you do so?

Flavored coffee usually get its flavor either from the roasted beans treated with chemical flavorings or from syrup added into the cup; find out more from About.com. Die-hard coffee drinkers may not find this notion acceptable, with the additional flavor "contaminating" the smell and taste of a bitter cup. Well, I am not really a faithful drinker and I find that strong taste a little unpleasant, so I prefer my cup to be blessed with some sweetness and flavor. I have tried some flavored coffee from different cafés, and sad to say that not all are up to my expectation, including those from the famous ones (your favorite neighborhood 'S' and 'C', pick one).

Adding sugar is not a very healthy option, and I dare not try adding syrup to my coffee either. Not all flavored coffee has its flavor mix well with the coffee; some flavors are so strong that you may forget you are drinking coffee, while others grant you the aroma but not the flavor to go with, leaving you disappointed at the first sip. The worst type will be coffee with flavor which sounds original but tastes bad (let's leave that to our imagination and hope we never come across this type...). So if you want to try adding syrup to spice up your coffee, be prepared that your coffee may not come out the way you expect.

Since sugar and creamer are not my choice for smoothening and sweetening my coffee, I had long learned to add milk to my coffee to make my own cup of cappuccino and latte (depending on how much milk I add...). Since I recently started consuming UHT milk, I tried adding the flavored ones, like chocolate and strawberry milk, into my morning's routine cup of coffee. Voilá! Here is my cup of home-made flavored coffee!

The great thing about this is that I can mix the milk's flavor with whatever flavor the coffee offers. Trying it with 3-in-1's offered great variety, especially most 3-in-1's original flavor differ from each other. Most of them offer hazelnut as a choice of flavored coffee, and adding strawberry milk into the drink gives a strawberry aroma, as well as offering both tastes. Of course, not everyone loves a cup of hazelnut coffee, especially if the taste is too strong, so do be prepared if you are experimenting with this, or just add flavored milk into your usual favorite original flavored 3-in-1.

So how much does this all add up? A usual sachet of 3-in-1 will average out to RM1+, and a 1L UHT milk may be around RM4+ and can let you experiment with lots of cups of coffee. Definitely cheaper than buying a cup from a café...