Recipe: Iced Coffee

We've been drinking lots of glasses full of iced coffee in the house for a cold jolt of energy in the middle of these hot summer days.

It's funny how the same exact mixed ingredients in a hot beverage can be completely transformed when served over ice. Iced coffee is one of those refreshing treats that's surprisingly simple to make — here's how we do it in our house...

You'll need lots of ice cubes, freshly brewed (then chilled) coffee of your choosing, cream and sweetener of your choosing — that's it.

Let's get started. First things first, getting your chilled coffee. We went with freshly brewed coffee (dark as dark blend from local roaster, Blanchards) that we transferred over to an empty glass milk bottle we had on hand and had let chill overnight in the fridge. You can keep chilled coffee like this in the fridge in a pitcher or other large container to use multiple times as needed instead of having to brew and chill every time.

Once you've got your chilled coffee ready, you are set for making iced coffee. Fill your glass to the brim with ice. One neat trick we've heard is to actually use more of that chilled coffee to make ice cubes out of for iced coffee — that way as you drink, the ice stays concentrated to coffee instead of getting watered down. We'd love to try this at some point, but have been sticking with regular old ice so far.

Pour chilled coffee over ice and leave room for cream. If you're not a cream type of person, you can call your coffee done!

 If you're like me and Tim, you like cream in your coffee, here's where you add as much as you like of the type of cream you like (milk, cream, half & half, soy, almond milk, you get the idea...).

It's fun to watch the creamy swirls and clouds take shape before stirring everything together:

Add sweetener if you like and gently stir to combine all ingredients. Then you'll have what iced coffee looks like in our house:

Tim to sit back, take a cool sip and enjoy. They've been particularly good as a mid afternoon pick-me-up.

How do you take your coffee? It's taken Tim and I almost 8 years to perfect one another's preferences and sometimes we still get it wrong. He likes a big serving of coffee with only enough half and half to turn the color and a packet of Sweet'N Low. I like my coffee with cream and that's it, but I'm not picky about the type of cream — milk, half and half, almond milk and I'm good. No sweetener but more cream than Tim likes.