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Monday, January 27, 2020

Creating Flavored Coffee and Tea on the Cheap

I can buy this product and spend about $1 per cup of delicious, almond-flavored coffee.




Or, I can use my inexpensive instant coffee and add almond extract (plus a little sweetening and creamer) and spend about 10 cents per cup of tasty, almond-flavored coffee.



I can buy this product and spend about 30 cents per cup of flavorful vanilla tea.



Or, I can use inexpensive, plain tea bags and add a few drops of imitation vanilla flavoring, spending under 5 cents per cup of flavorful vanilla tea.

I also doctor up plain coffee with cinnamon, nutmeg, and/or vanilla for flavor. I brought a wonderful thermos of creamy, cinnamon-vanilla coffee with me when out the other day. Having this with me kept me from the temptation to buy a cup of coffee, as mine was as delicious as any coffee house coffee.

These tasty little treats costs pennies, but they keep me on my budget without deprivation.

13 comments:

  1. You live in a place with a lot of coffee, so it must be tempting when you go out. Very smart to take coffee along to resist the temptation of good coffee that surrounds you. I don't drink coffee so the temptations of fancy coffee are easy for me. Chips, that's another thing.

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  2. Not a fan of coffee - but tea - that's the drink for me! I actually buy brand/kind you mentioned - I get it MUCH cheaper in central PA; however, I never thought (or would have thought) to add vanilla to change the taste! So ingenious! I have plain tea at work - tomorrow I bring my vanilla!

    Have a great week Lili!

    Shelby

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  3. I am also more of a tea drinker, but I have learned to like coffee in the past 10 years or so. I've tried adding vanilla and different spices to both tea and coffee--I think my favorite is cinnamon with either beverage. I like cinnamon in hot chocolate, as well. The bonus of using this method is you can tailor your tastes specifically to what you want. Starbucks has a few different items in shakers that you can add to your coffee--you are, in effect, making your own coffee and tea bar at home!

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  4. Hi Live and Learn,
    Yes, you're right. Everywhere I go, there's a coffee kiosk or shop. I often wonder if it's like this in other states. Most grocery stores, here, have a Starbucks in the store. And even though I live in the suburbs and not right up against a major road, I could walk to 4 different coffee shops/ shacks/ kiosks from my home. So the temptation is everywhere, for someone like me who does love coffee.

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  5. Hi Shelby,
    You're right. I'm sure the specific tea is found for much less elsewhere. Amazon was a quick comparison. The principle is still the same, that adding inexpensive flavorings at home is a cost-saver. Hope you enjoy your hand-crafted vanilla tea.

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  6. I am not a flavored coffee drinker, so fancy coffees don't interest me at all. In fact, I like 'seconds', weak coffee via our Keurig. My husband does his cup, then I do mine on the same coffee pod. We usually buy the pods less than .25 each, so that makes our coffee only .10 per cup. We hardly buy coffee outside.

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  7. Oops YHF, comment above.

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  8. Hi Kris,
    Yes, just like the add-ins at Starbucks. Cloves are good in tea, too. You can make a nice spiced tea using plain tea bags and cinnamon, cloves and ginger.
    I've bought Mexican hot chocolate before that has cinnamon added. Very good and something slightly different from the usual cocoa.

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  9. I don't drink hot tea or coffee, but I do make a cup of hot cocoa, using a Keto recipe.

    2 T heavy cream
    1 T baking cocoa
    2 Packets of stevia
    Mix with a cup of boiling water.

    Delish!

    Midwest Gal

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  10. That's a pretty good deal for you, YHF!

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  11. Your keto cocoa sounds interesting, Midwest Gal. Thank you for sharing!

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  12. I stumbled on your blog today looking for instructions for using frozen yogurt cultures to make a new batch of yogurt and decided to explore further.

    I recently started making my own copycat lattes using instant coffee and hot milk then adding whatever flavors I can think up (I usually go back to chocolate almond or vanilla). I do the same as you and make some to go before I go to town because if I don't, the urge to stop at a coffee shop will likely overwhelm me! I hadn't thought of flavoring tea - I may have to give that a shot (I suspect it'll be cheaper to just buy my favorite Earl Grey instead of making it, though! I'm curious now, so I'll have to look into it!)

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  13. Hi Katie,
    I'm glad you found us, here.
    With tea -- do you have access to culinary lavender buds? I found that some lavender buds added to plain black tea tasted something like Earl Grey. I have a large pot of lavender on our deck that I harvest from each summer, so this is basically free for me.
    Anyway, I'm glad you commented because it's nice to know someone else who makes a nice thermos of coffee to take when running errands. I hope you come back!

    ReplyDelete

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