Copycat Coffee-Shop Drinks to Make at Home

The reason a coffee habit costs what it does is that you are buying an espresso and a shot of syrup for the price of a small meal, and the syrup costs about eleven pence to make.

Which makes this the highest-return collection on the site measured in money per minute of effort.

Make the vanilla syrup first. Four minutes, about forty pence, keeps six months, and it is the base for hazelnut, cinnamon, gingerbread, toffee nut and brown sugar - every variation is on that page.

Then the mocha sauce, because a sauce and a syrup are different things and using one where the other belongs is why home mochas taste thin.

After that the drinks are assembly.

You do not need an espresso machine. A moka pot at £20 and a handheld frother at £6 cover everything in this collection, because in a milk drink with syrup the coffee is a flavouring rather than the whole event. The what to buy and in what order guide sets out the honest sequence, which most people do backwards.

Five drinks a week bought is over a thousand pounds a year. The same drinks made here are under ninety.