Secret to Homemade Frappuccinos

Hi, my name is Meredith and I am a coffee junkie.

I drink black coffee the vast majority of the time, but in the summer I do like iced coffee.  Iced coffee is easy to do at home, and I think BETTER since you can control how strong you want the coffee, how much / what kind of sweetener is used, etc.  I've found most iced coffee from stores are way over-sweetened.

So for homemade iced coffee I usually just brew a pot of coffee nice and super strong, pour it into a quart mason jar and stick it in the fridge.  The next day - iced coffee!  I drink it fast enough that there isn't much risk of it getting warm, but a nice touch is to make coffee ice cubes if you think you'll need some ice.  That way your drink isn't watered down.

The coffee drink I hadn't mastered at home was the blended coffee drink.  The coffee shops charge a FORTUNE for these drinks!  It's insane.  But every once in a while I'll cave and get one because I love the texture.  It's like a coffee milkshake!  Mm'mmm.....

There are plenty of recipes out there for making these blended coffee drinks at home.  There's one here, another one here, and I'm sure many more.  So this is totally do-able, right?!

Sadly, my blender is super wimpy.  I tried making a whole tray of coffee ice cubes and dumping them all in the blender and pouring some cold coffee over them.... and the blender just whined.  It didn't even move the ice cubes around!  At the time I chalked it up to needing one of the professional-quality blenders they have in the coffee stores and just gave up trying to make it at home.

This is, until..... yesterday.  This is going to sound pathetic but I honestly hadn't thought of this before, and none of the recipes I had found online mentioned it either.  I poured in the cold coffee, and added just TWO coffee ice cubes and turned the blender on.... and it could handle that.  I left it on, and slowly fed in 2 coffee ice cubes at a time and it totally worked!  WHOO HOO!  Code cracked!

For the homemade frappuccino I did put a sprinkle of sugar in the warm coffee that I used to make the coffee ice cubes.  Then while it was all in the blender I poured in a dash of cream at the end.  This was close to the straight-up coffee flavored blended drink.

My mother-in-law loves the mocha flavored frappuccino, and she had a great idea - stir in a touch of sugar and coco powder to the warm coffee before pouring it into the ice cube trays.  She's tried it and loves it!

Go forth and enjoy delicious and MUCH CHEAPER blended coffee goodness, even those of us with really wimpy blenders :-)