Nescafe Latte Flavour Creamy Tiramisu Coffee Sachets, Dessert Edition, 7 Sachets 136.5g

The Story Behind The Dessert Edition

Nescafé has been building flavoured milk sachets for years, and the Dessert Edition line is the end of that road: drinks named after puddings rather than after coffees. The commercial logic is obvious enough. A sweet sachet sells a first sip better than a plain one, and a pudding name sells it better still. Read it as a confectionery product that happens to be made with a kettle.

Packaging: Tiramisu box, sachets and all, may need splitting up at recycling; follow the carton and your council's rules.

What You Are Actually Buying

• Count: seven single-serve sachets of 19.5g each, one mug per sachet, so seven drinks from the box.
• Milk included: every 19.5g sachet carries its own milk as powder, hence a box that never needs the fridge and happily travels. Dairy free drinkers, by the same token, must give it a miss.
• Sweet by design: this is a dessert drink and it tastes like one. If you want to control the sweetness yourself, an unsweetened cappuccino sachet is the product for that job and this is not.
• Water only: no milk jug, no frother, no machine. Boil a kettle, find a mug, and you are equipped.
• What it is not: not a dessert. It is a hot drink flavoured like one, and it will not stand in for a pudding at the table, only alongside one or instead of one on the sofa.

Ideal Serving Conditions

Milk sachets have a poor reputation and most of it is self-inflicted. Two habits account for nearly all of it: water at a rolling boil, which gives powdered milk a cooked, faintly tinny edge that fights the cream note, and stirring the mug after the pour, which flattens the foam the pour just built. Neither takes any effort to fix, and on a sweet drink the difference is larger than you expect, because the cooked note lands in the same place as the sweetness.

The Proper Mug

• Measure: one sachet to 180 to 200ml. Stretch it further and the cream note thins out first, leaving the sugar on its own.
• Water: give the kettle a minute's grace after boiling, so the pour is around 90 degrees Celsius.
• Pour: tip the tiramisu powder into a dry mug and send the water in quickly from well above it. The drop is what makes the foam.
• Do not stir: or stir once, briefly, from the bottom. Every extra stir is foam you have knocked flat.

The Pudding Builds

• Dust it: a scrape of cocoa powder over the foam. It costs nothing and it is the single change that makes the drink taste finished rather than sweet.
• Sponge fingers: predictable, yes, and still the one to dunk. Dip them and you have a deconstructed tiramisu for the price of a biscuit.
• Make it on milk: hot milk instead of water gives a much richer mug. It is an upgrade rather than a requirement, and it does make the drink heavier.
• Iced: make it on half the water, stir until smooth, then pour over ice and top with cold milk. Cold flattens sweetness, so an iced version of a dessert sachet is often more drinkable than the hot one.

Getting It Right in the Cup

• Water temperature: near enough 90 degrees Celsius, never a fresh rolling boil.
• Measure: one sachet to a normal 180 to 200ml mug; an oversized cup only thins it.
• Method: dry mug and powder, then a tall fast pour, then barely any stirring.
• Storage: unopened sachets stay in the box, somewhere dry. Damp gets into a split sachet and sets the powder like cement.
• Travelling: the format's real advantage. No jar, no milk, no fridge, and seven mugs that fit flat in a bag.
• Best with: sponge fingers, an evening on the sofa, or as the thing you drink instead of a pudding rather than after one.