Roasted coffee bean butter: a great ingredient for coffee lovers

I am so excited to share this post for roasted coffee bean butter. Coffee is one of my favourite flavours, almost beating chocolate for me. This butter, which is basically freshly ground coffee beans infused with hot butter, has a very rich, deep coffee flavour that you simply cannot get close to when using either instant coffee or even freshly brewed coffee in a bake.

Roasted coffee butter

I have never actually come across a coffee butter before, but after stumbling across a recipe for tea butter a while back (see my post on Earl Grey tea butter), I had to try out my idea for a coffee variation.

roasted coffee shortbread biscuits

A superb ingredient

While I typically use instant coffee powder in coffee cakes and icings, this roasted coffee butter adds so many more layers of flavour, giving greater coffee intensity but without it taking over.

This coffee butter has now become one of the most exciting ingredients in my kitchen.

My ultimate coffee & walnut cake

The butter might seem a little quirky, and it might not look to be the prettiest thing in the world, but it is, quite simply, a superb baking ingredient for anyone who loves coffee. And when I say coffee, I mean real coffee: the type of coffee that aficionados, and I count myself in that group, go weak at the knees for and will trample over people queuing for de-caff in order to get our cup of great coffee!

Tiramisu macarons

A simple ingredient to make

This coffee butter is a very simple and it takes just moments. It keeps perfectly in the fridge for as long as you can keep butter normally.

It has the most amazingly complex aroma, and as you make it the whole house smells like a high-end coffee shop – quite wonderful.

I have made several batches of the coffee butter, and at the risk of being labelled pretentious (please slap me now!) I have varied the coffee bean in each batch, so I now have different flavoured coffee butters. I cannot wait to return to Hawaii and re-visit more of the coffee farms: I am already salivating at the prospect of Kona coffee butter. Just turn a blind eye to the carbon footprint!

Using roasted coffee butter in bakes

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Some of my favourite bakes using the coffee butter are below. My recipes for these bakes will follow shortly, and I will add the limks to the bottom of this page, but if you want any tips before I publish them, please do contact me.

In cakes:

You can use the butter in place of normal butter in a cake: it holds its flavour very well indeed, giving the cake a complex coffee flavour, with a hint of spice notes in there.

Intense roasted coffee cupcakes

In icings and fillings:

The butter is particularly excellent used to make buttercream: mix it with up to an equal amount of normal unsalted butter, along with the icing sugar, for what I promise is the best coffee buttercream you have ever tasted.

As I have mentioned in some of my other cake posts, for the most melt-in-the-mouth buttercreams use between the same weight and half as much again in icing sugar as the butter, rather than twice the weight of butter that is often suggested. So for 100g butter, use between 100g and 150g icing sugar.

Intense roasted coffee cupcakes

If you want even more of a coffee hit, don’t “dilute” it at all with unsalted butter: just mix the coffee butter with the icing sugar.

As well as using as an excellent topping for coffee cupcakes, the coffee butter is superb in coffee-flavoured macarons. The instant filling for my tiramisu macarons (below) is a mixture of the coffee butter, mascarpone cheese, marsala wine and just a touch of chocolate.

Tiramisu macarons

In biscuits:

As with cakes, simply replace the fat content with the same amount of the coffee butter. It is perfect for coffee shortbread biscuits – especially when you have a little dark chocolate and sugar nibs on top for those bitter, sweet and buttery flavour combinations.

roasted coffee shortbread biscuits

Recipe: coffee butter – makes about 500g

• 500g unsalted butter, chopped up a little
• 100g roasted coffee beans, ground for a few seconds to give a fairly coarse ground

(1) Put the butter and the coffee beans in a pan and heat gently until the butter has melted. Bring to a simmer and let the mixture simmer very gently for about a minute.

(2) Remove from the heat and leave to infuse for about 30 minutes. Strain it through a fine sieve into a bowl and press as much butter out of the sieve as you can.

(3) Refrigerate until set and use what you need in a recipe. You will have some of the grounds in the bottom of the coffee butter but keep them there. If you want to distribute them more evenly, give the butter a mix when it has started to set.

Recipe links

Simple roasted coffee shortbread (no rolling out)
Earl Grey tea butter