Homemade Maple Vanilla Coffee Creamer

Seasonal coffee creamer is one of the quietest recurring expenses in a grocery cart. A bottle runs four to five dollars, lasts about a week, and disappears from shelves in November. Made at home, the same week’s worth costs somewhere near a dollar fifty and uses ingredients that do other jobs the rest of the year.

There is no cooking involved. Everything goes in a jar and gets shaken. The only real decision is the dairy: half-and-half makes the closest match to a store bottle, whole milk makes a lighter creamer, and a can of sweetened condensed milk thinned with regular milk makes the richest version of all. That last one is the trick behind most bottled creamers, which are essentially sweetened condensed milk with flavoring.

Homemade creamer has no stabilizers, so it separates in the refrigerator. That is not a problem. It is what unstabilized dairy does, and shaking the jar before pouring brings it back together.

Homemade Maple Vanilla Coffee Creamer

Half-and-half, maple syrup, vanilla, and cinnamon shaken in a jar — a week of seasonal creamer in five minutes, at about a third the price of the bottled kind.

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Prep Time 5 minutes mins

Course Drinks

Cuisine American

Servings 12 servings

Ingredients

  

• 1 1/2 cups half-and-half whole milk, or a mix of the two
• 3 tablespoons pure maple syrup or 3 tablespoons sweetened condensed milk
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1 pinch salt

Instructions

 

• Pour the half-and-half into a clean jar with a tight-fitting lid. A recycled 16-ounce jar is exactly the right size.
• Add the maple syrup, vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg, and salt.
• Seal the jar and shake hard for 30 seconds, until the cinnamon has stopped floating in visible streaks and the whole mixture looks uniform.
• Taste a spoonful and adjust. It should taste slightly too sweet and slightly too strong on its own – coffee dilutes it considerably.
• Refrigerate. Shake again before each pour, since the spices settle and the mixture separates without commercial stabilizers.
• Use within one week, or by the expiration date printed on the dairy you used, whichever comes first.

Notes

The dairy’s own expiration date is the real shelf life here. Making a batch the same day you open a fresh carton buys the most use out of it.

For a shelf-stable version that lasts three weeks: use evaporated milk in place of half-and-half. It is sold in cans, costs less, and needs no refrigeration until opened.

Sweetened condensed milk makes the richest, most bottled-tasting creamer. Use 3 tablespoons and skip the maple syrup. One can makes about five batches and freezes well in portions.

A quarter teaspoon of cinnamon per cup of dairy is the limit before it turns gritty. Steeping a cinnamon stick in gently warmed cream for ten minutes gives cleaner flavor with no sediment at all.

Variations: add 2 tablespoons homemade pumpkin spice syrup for a pumpkin creamer, 1 tablespoon unsweetened cocoa powder for a mocha creamer, or swap half the vanilla for 1/4 teaspoon almond extract.

Non-dairy versions work with full-fat canned coconut milk or barista-style oat milk. Almond milk is too thin to read as creamer.

Label the jar with the date. Homemade creamer looks identical on day one and day nine, and there is no printed date to check.

Keyword coffee creamer, homemade creamer, make-ahead, maple vanilla