Is Coffee Flavouring on the Endangered List

Posted on: 2016-12-20 1:36 PM

It isn’t just toffees. Go to a patisserie or ice-cream parlor and you will find chocolate in various flavours, forms, and concentrations, but hardly any coffee flavoured treats. It’s like the Dessert Decision Makers have decreed we can only have one brown coloured confection and it’s not coffee. Even mocha, the coffee-chocolate combination that brings out the best of both flavours, is rare.
 
When coffee desserts exist they feel inadequate. Ice-cream parlors sometimes have a coffee-almond flavour, but this isn’t as good as coffee-walnut, where the slight bitterness of walnuts complements the bitterness of coffee better than the bland richness of almonds. Coffee walnut cake is a classic, but hardly anyone makes it. (This is actually flavoured with coffee, unlike most coffee cakes which, confusingly, got their name because they are meant to be eaten while drinking coffee).
 
One place that still serves a coffee flavoured classic is the Sea Lounge at the Taj in Mumbai. Their Café Viennois is a wonderfully refreshing combination of coffee, coffee ice-cream and whipped cream. In Europe this is now called Café Liegeois in a somewhat strange sweet tribute to the city of Liège in Belgium which in 1914 held off the advancing German army for much longer than expected, enabling France to prepare better for invasion. Parisian cafes renamed their Café Viennois after the city, but the message never reached Mumbai.
 
Looking for alternatives
 
Le15, a Mumbai-based patisserie does make excellent coffee flavoured macaroons. But éclairs filled with coffee cream are a sophisticated alternative to the standard éclairs with chocolate and vanilla cream, yet are hard to find (to be honest, really good éclairs of any kind are hard to find).
 
Tiramisu trouble
 
And then there is Tiramisù, the one coffee flavoured dessert that is widely available, but I’m convinced is part of the problem. Most examples I have encountered here are simply horrid, with mascarpone cheese that is cloying rather than creamy (if mascarpone used at all, and not some rancid substitute) and cake soaked in joltingly strong coffee, rather than a more balanced brew. All this bad Tiramisù, I think, has given coffee desserts in general a bad name.
 
The perfect flavour
 
What’s odd is that this disappearance of coffee desserts comes at a time when coffee as a beverage has never been more available, in cafes like Starbucks and its various clones. But perhaps this is part of the problem. Many of the coffees at these cafes add so many odd flavours – pumpkin spice? chestnut? – and toppings and swirls of cream that they effectively become desserts in themselves.
 
But the problem is that they fall short on both counts. They are rather nauseating drinks, and offer none of the more solid pleasures of desserts. Coffee needs to be redeemed from them, with cakes, pastries and even toffees simply, but perfectly coffee flavoured.