Tia Maria tested
If you cast your mind back, a friend (Kaaron Warren - one very scary horror writer) and I made up my aunt’s Tia Maria recipe a month ago. We made two batches: one with normal amounts of sugar and one with 2/3 sweetener (stevia and splenda) instead of sugar. Today was Kaaron’s farewell party and we broached the bottles.
Lower calorie version
One person didn’t like the faint aftertaste of artificial sweetener. One person drank it out from choice and loved it. Another couple of people sampled it and said it was OK. My personal opinion is that it is OK, but nothing special. I will try it in coffee and see if that diminishes the taste of stevia. I will try other sweeteners next time and see if I can come up with a version that has no aftertaste at all, because that would make such a good drink for people who like Tia Maria but are watching calories. We made two bottles and have just under one bottle left, so it is definitely worth making again.
“Normal” Tia Maria
Everyone’s favourite drink. Most people drank it with milk (though two people drank it neat) and if it had not been for the filling nature of the full cream milk, the whole lot would have been entirely demolished. The comments were that it has a stronger coffee flavour than commerical Tia Maria but is also more delicious. Now we know why my aunt swore by her secret Tia Maria recipe.
The recipe is here. I made two changes to it. I used real coffee (kopi jawa ie Indonesian style) instead of instant and I used raw sugar instead of white. It took about ten minutes to make from start to finish. We aged it for just under a month, because Kaaron’s departure date had to be respected, and it tasted a trifle fresh but not majorly so. A few more weeks ageing would have improved it but - as the testers proved - it was perfectly delicious today.
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