Warming Winter Breakfast

As it is almost officially the middle of winter, Mum and I had a sneaky dash of warming brandy in our Sunday morning breakfast coffee. This was Mum’s idea entirely, and a very good one too, as was adding a bit more than a splash of cream to our coffee.

The coffee we used was roasted locally by The Original Firsthand Coffee Roasting Company. We are very impressed with the flavour of this coffee – sweet and mellow, nutty and chocolatey, with no bitter after-taste. It is a lovely coffee for making at home to get a cafe style flavour – and it goes well with brandy, which was most important on a cold winter morning.

And it was a chilly morning, the sun appeared briefly, then clouds gathered, so we had breakfast inside at the kitchen bench rather than sitting outside in the sun as we had planned. We had weet-bix with warm milk, brown sugar, and our favourite yoghurt – lemon delicious made by Puhoi, a New Zealand company. Also in our breakfast bowls we had warmed stewed apricots. Mum always has a freezer full of foods she has prepared, and she stewed these apricots last summer, then froze them (thanks to the next-door-neighbours for their apricots). To top it off, we had a drizzle (or more) of cream on our breakfast (but no brandy).

The breakfast bowl looked very nice and bright in a patch of winter sunshine (when the sun came out for a brief time), and the apricots reminded us of summertime.

This breakfast was a very nice combination of flavours and textures and the warm milk and warmed stewed apricots were just what we needed on a cold winter’s morning, plus the warming brandy in the coffee!

We used the remainder of the stewed apricots to make Apricot and Walnut Muffins later in the morning. See my blog for the Apricot and Walnut Muffins recipe.