Cappuccino and Ham Cups

Perfect Saturday morning breakfast makes the weekend so much better! Rather than stick with the boring fried egg and bacon, I chose to go another route and test out an awesome idea I saw on pinterest. I paired it with the first cappuccino I’ve made myself from the inspiration of my mothers kitchen.

When I was on the east coast this holiday visiting my family my mom made me the perfect cappuccino every morning. When I was in high school, we hosted an Italian exchange student who taught us all kinds of tips and tricks in the kitchen and we were able to find the right equipment so she could teach us (or really just my mom) how to make the perfect cappuccino.

It wasn’t until my last year in college that I started experimenting with coffee and drinking it on a daily basis, even then I was only buying it from cafes, not making my own. After almost a week of morning cappuccinos from home I had to buy myself the tools necessary to make them myself. I was able to find both the “Bialetti” moka express and the milk frother from a local independent coffee store.

I had  my mom on the phone in no time to get those golden instructions on how to make this perfect cappuccino so crucial in my Saturday morning wake-up. It’s pretty easy but you want to make sure you are paying attention to all that’s going on as to not boiler the milk or burn the coffee.

All you need to do is unscrew the bottom part of the Bialetti and remove the filter. Fill the heater (bottom section) with water up to the valve (the small bolt you’ll see on the side). Put the filter back in and fill that with your choice ground coffee. Screw the top back on and place in on a burner on your stove. The crappy thing about my stove is that it’s electric, I can’t express to you how much I hate it. If you are a victim of the electric stove you need to make sure you place the contraption on the edge of the burner so the handle isn’t directly over the heat and melting it.

Put the heat on medium and let it do the rest. While you wait for the coffee to be made you can place a small saucepan on another burner and put about 2/3-3/4 cup of milk and heat to warm it up, DON’T BOIL! Now you see, it’s important to keep your eye on these guys because everything goes pretty quickly after this.

You will soon hear a steaming sound from your ‘moka express’ which indicates that the coffee is filtering up to the top section and is pretty much done, you can open the lid to see the progress. Remove it from the heat and pour into your coffee cup. Once you see steam coming from your milk you want to remove it from the heat and pour it into your milk frother. This step will give you the awesome foamy feature of those delicious cappuccinos. Place the cover on your frother and pump to your desired foaminess, about 50 pumps. Pour the milk into the coffee mug where your coffee patiently waits and finally, sprinkle it with some sugar, ground cinnamon, or anything else you desire.

Now the ham cups are pretty self explanatory. All you need is a cupcake pan, some ham (or bacon) and a few eggs. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Place the ham inside the cupcake holder to form, well, a cup. Crack the egg into the ham shaped cup and cook for about 10 minutes. Some people are just genius, what an awesome idea!