Sometimes in life you get the privilege of choosing your own family where the connection feels magical. I was blessed enough to be able to choose my own brother (from another mother). We shared a house for more than a year and he now stays one town away and I miss him and having him around terribly.

He came to my town for a day and we spent it at a friend’s mother’s coffee shop. Living in a place like South Africa with our economy on a constant downward spiral, one needs to get creative! This brother of mine has always had a very unique mind and been very creative, don’t ask me how he got the idea in his head but he decided to make home-made crème liquor.

I am always very skeptical of my brother’s hair brained ideas and even asked the owner of the coffee shop is she trusted what the boys were doing.

It started with making our own ideal milk (one again South Africa’s economy made us decide to make our own). How does one make ideal milk, you might ask? Well I did at least. The answer = you boil milk!!! Okay, it is slightly more complicated than just leaving a pot of milk on the stove for an hour- that would just be a disaster!

So you start off by measuring the amount of milk you would like to use, and add half of it to a thick-based sauce pan. You then take a sosatie stick (kebab skewer) place it in the milk and mark where the milk is against the sosatie stick. You add the rest of the milk and slowly bring to a boil.

There is one annoying thing about making ideal milk yourself and that would be constantly removing and discarding the layer of skin that forms on top of the milk. Once the amount of milk once again reaches the level it was when it was marked on the sosatie stick, you have ideal milk, also known as evaporated milk. The process can take quite a while though as you don’t want to have the sauce pan become too hot and burn the milk.

So while the boys were making ideal milk and getting to business on the liquor, I got roped into helping cover chocolate coated truffles in chocolate. One would think that it’s an easy task…nope! I think with a lot of practice and some skill you could manage to always have them come out perfect. However on a first try my hands and feet- yes my feet too- were covered in chocolate and my truffles were definitely not all perfectly covered in chocolate. Luckily they were to be saved by having white chocolate drizzled over them the following day.

I have a new respect for bakers- tasks that appear to be seemingly easy take a lot more time, effort and skill than we realise! I won’t be complaining about the price of a treat any time soon!

So back to the boys and what seemed like their Dexter’s Laboratory experiment… Once the milk had boiled down to half of what it was (500 ml), they added a tin of condensed milk (sadly I don’t know how to make this at home yet) and three tablespoons of coffee. They then waited for this mixture to cool down, and according to them it already tasted sublime!

Once the mixture was at about room temperature, they added the alcohol, 300 ml of Brandy. They mixed it well and gave each of us a taste (in improvised shot glasses of course)! Indeed their creative flair and mad scientist ideas paid off and they had accomplished making a magical cost effective crème coffee liquor!

There is a magic about spending time with those who are like family to you, and to create something together in that time just melts it into your memory! My brother has inspired me to try many more home made things, first up being homemade feta cheese (goat’s cheese). You’ll have to wait for my next post to see whether I succeed and if I’ll be making tuna & feta puffs or just tuna puffs!

Love Jo xo

Jo’s 3 Take Aways:

1. Creativity is key
2. Respect your baker
3. Find people who love like family