café hanoi

This is a spectacular dessert in terms of mixture of textures and tastes. Sweet, salty and bitter at the same time as well as creamy and crunchy. Don’t ask me where this name comes from! I had it at a restaurant, and I think it has nothing to do with Vietnam or Hanoi, but I loved it and tried to copy it, knowing some of the ingredients, inventing the others - and it is not too big after a heavy meal...

Ingredients for 4 (or more, depending on the size of the cups):

• 80g of spice cookies (Lotus Spekulatius are the best in my view)

• 40g of creamy peanut butter

• 2 espressi (take a good espresso, a short and strong ristretto works best)

• 100ml of heavy cream

• 1 TS corn flour

First, put the cookies into a plastic bag and smash them with a wooden stick or something in order to have a sandy kind of texture, but not too smooth. Make sure to have some bigger pieces in there which you will need for decoration.

Whip the cream until stiff (not too much though, just stop before it gets too stiff) and mix in the crushed cookies, but keep some for decoration. Taste the cream, it should be sweet, otherwise add some more crushed cookies up to your liking.

Now, in small pan, slowly heat the peanut butter to soften it a little bit, and when it got a semi-liquid texture, put into four coffee cups and let cool down for about 2 minutes. Distribute the cream on top and give it a single quick twist with a spoon, just to slightly fold the peanut butter into the cream-cookie mixture.

Make the espresso and transfer it into a small sauce pan in order to bring it to a boil. In a very small amount of water, like two tea spoons, dissolve the corn flour, and mix it into the boiling coffee. Let cool down and watch how the espresso thickens.

Now you can pour the thick coffee, just a table spoon of it, on the cream-cookie-peanut butter mixture in the cups and decorate with the crushed Spekulatius cookies.

Enjoy!