Coffee. It’s not just for drinking. You can—and should—eat it too. 

Add brewed coffee to deepen the flavor of your next chocolate cake, add a punchy surprise to whipped cream, and make next-level cookies. Keep a container of cold brew in the fridge, and you’ll always be ready to swap in some flavor.

Here’s our four favorite ways to eat your coffee.   

1. Make coffee whipped cream

   For your next batch of whipped cream, sub cold brewed coffee concentrate for the vanilla. Or use both, especially if you have vanilla bean paste, which will make the mix less liquid.

2. Use brewed coffee to deepen the flavor of chocolate. 

   Jami Curl, author of Candy is Magic, started pouring her leftover coffee into a jar and keeping it in the fridge for baking. Why? Because coffee shares a few key flavors with chocolate, and when you mix in a little strong coffee you get a deeper chocolate but without the coffee flavor. Swap out cold brew concentrate or leftover coffee for some of the liquid in your recipe. It’s basically magic. Here’s a primer from Food52. 

3. Bake up some cold brew cookies

   We stumbled across this trick one holiday season in a frenzy of cookie making. And it’s simple...add cold brew to cookies. Yes, the chocolate kind. But the peanut butter and oatmeal kind too. All the kinds. Read all about it. 

4. Pour coffee syrup on things

   Thicken and sweeten your coffee and pour it over ice cream or pancakes. We wrote about this a few months ago, and it’s worth a revisit!