120 years of Lavazza Coffee (& GIVEAWAY)

Last month, I received a lovely delivery of goodies from Lavazza!

Lavazza are recognised worldwide for their coffee and in 2015, celebrated 120 years of production. Through four generations, Lavazza has been committed to developing the art of coffee by developing quality flavours and blends.

I received a collection of their anniversary blend -100% Brazilian Arabica coffee with delicate hints of chocolate and caramel – all in specially designed, limited edition Lavazza tins.  I also received a set of Lavazza limited coffee cups and saucers.

I was asked to check out the Lavazza recipe index and perhaps try out a recipe if I wanted. I had a peruse and there are some delicious sounding ways to use your Lavazza blend besides your morning coffee (incidentally, I really don’t like drinking coffee, but I do like coffee-flavoured food!). I decided to try out two recipes.

(I should mention here that I don’t think the recipes are the clearest, some of the instructions are muddled and the method/ingredient list can be confusing, so it’s worth having a read through several times to decide how closely you want to follow the recipe. It’s been suggested by a couple of my baking friends that the instructions might have been poorly translated from Italian – either way, the recipes could do with some tweaking/sharpening up to avoid confusion – I have fed this information back to Lavazza on the recipes that I tried out.)

I tried out the Crostata Mocha (Italian Coffee tart) and the Coffee semifreddo.

Due to a lack of clarity in the  recipe for the crostata, these didn’t end up looking quite like the ones in the recipe picture! There were too many details omitted in the recipe for me to get the desired result (the mocha cream was looking great until it was chilled in the fridge while the pastry was being made, chilled and baked, but the recipe stated that it needed to be lukewarm when it was poured into the cooked tarts?! It was also difficult to know what size tart tin to use – I decided to use individual tart tins – and there was no blind baking involved either which I was suspicious about but I went with the instructions…) but, that said, I did get an OK result for my finished tart, which was more a tart base topped with a mocha ganache, dusted with icing sugar and topped with some blackberries I had kicking around the fridge.

I had a lot more success with the semifreddo recipe. This had a subtle coffee flavour and a lovely smooth texture. Mr B said that this was a restaurant quality dessert which I was pleased with. (I did have a bit of confusion again with the recipe – there’s no mention of what size tin to use – I went with a 2lb loaf tin, but also made a individual ramekin dessert and some mini semifreddo madeleines, and there was even more mixture to spare! There’s also no mention of the sugared coffee in the ingredients list, even though it’s mentioned right at the end of the recipe to drizzle on the sponge cake – for which I bought a mini reduced price pandoro to continue on the proper italian ingredients. I just made a very sugary coffee and used about 25ml of it on the sponge cake). I’d make this again  – though would probably halve the ingredients!

Thanks to Lavazza who sent me the cups and coffee in order to try out the anniversary blend and promote Lavazza’s recipe section on the Lavazza website. I was not paid for this post and all opinions are my own.

To win your own pair of limited edition Lavazza cups and saucers, plus two tins of Lavazza’s anniversary blend coffee, simply watch the Lavazza celebration video embedded at the top of this post and leave a comment with the correct answer to the following question, either in the comments below, or in the comments for this post on the Mess in the Ness Facebook page:

In what year did vacuum packing revolutionalise the distribution of Lavazza coffee?

Terms and Conditions:

• Only comments on this post/the FB post associated with this article received before midnight on Friday 15th January 2016 from within the UK will be acceptable entries.
• Mess in the Ness will contact the winner, drawn at random, by Monday 18th January 2016 to obtain a delivery address. Mess in the Ness will then send out the prize by recorded delivery to the winner by Friday 22nd January.