Looking for a sweet treat through your coffee? Here’s an inventive coffee drink that combines America’s favorite cookie—Oreo—and the famous sweet cream from Starbucks.

It’s creamy, sweet (but not too sweet), and has a hint of cocoa. You can customize this recipe to your taste with more Oreos, more sweet cream, less sugar, etc. But my favorite part of any coffee drink with sweet cream is how it melts into the coffee when you pour it on top.

How to Brew Iced Coffee

This recipe calls for brewed coffee versus an espresso shot. The sweet cream adds a lot of richness and cream to the drink, so we want the base of our drink to be brewed coffee.

If you use a latte as the base, it will taste very good but very milky. If that’s what you like, go for it, but if you want more balance, use brewed coffee.

You can make iced coffee in many ways, but the easiest way to brew coffee is through French press or Aeropress. The easiest way to brew coffee is through a machine, but there are other ways if you don’t have a machine.

If you have specialty coffee equipment, a pour-over coffee is the best method to make iced coffee, especially if you flash-brew it. You can use a Chemex, Hario filter, etc.

The easiest option, though, is to buy chilled brewed coffee from the store. You can even use cold brew for a stronger drink.

How to Make Sweet Cream

Sweet cream is such a classic flavor and drink topping. Starbucks popularized it when they started adding it to their cold brews, and now you can even customize sweet cream with different flavors like lavender, cinnamon, pumpkin, etc.

Just like the name suggests, sweet cream is literally just sweetened heavy cream. But it’s different than whipped cream because it’s pourable.

To make sweet cream, all you need is heavy cream, sugar, and 2% (or any) milk. The reason why just heavy cream by itself doesn’t make sweet cream is that it becomes stiff when you whip it enough.

Food Science Break: Whipped cream is a foam formed when a substance suspends gas bubbles in itself. When you whip heavy cream, the milk proteins surround the air bubbles and stabilize them. Then, the fat joins in and stabilizes the air in the cream. The higher the fat content, the more stable the whipped cream!

So, to ensure that our sweet cream is still pourable, we add a little 2% milk to the mixture to thin out the cream. This ensures that the cream never reaches a stiff whipped cream.

Equipment You’ll Need

To make Oreo iced coffee, you’ll need your coffee brewing equipment, several cups, stirring utensils, a whisk or electric mixer, and an ice machine (or make ice beforehand).

Note: I love using a handheld frother to make sweet cream because it’s easy, small, and doesn’t require different-sized bowls.

You’ll need a bowl or cup to whip your sweet cream, a cup to measure your cream and milk (unless you eyeball), and a cup to make and drink your coffee.

I also recommend using a reusable glass straw if you like sipping your beverages over time. A straw is also great for this drink because you’ll want to combine the cream and the coffee before drinking.

Without a straw, you can use a spoon or chopstick to mix them before drinking.

How to Make it Dairy-Free

Luckily, Oreos are vegan and gluten-free! They are the champion treat of diet restrictions (and were the go-to snack when I was a resident assistant hosting events for my residents).

You can use coconut cream or milk, a non-dairy heavy cream, or cashew cream for the sweet cream. A coconut substitute might have a coconutty flavor, which might be perfect for you if you love coconut.

But there are many vegan heavy cream alternatives now, including ones from Silk, Califia Farms, Nature’s Farm, etc.

How to Float Your Sweet Cream

Nothing is more disappointing than adding a sweet cream on top and watching it dissolve instantly into your drink.

Make sure that you’re incorporating enough air into your sweet cream! If it’s not whipped enough, it won’t have enough stability to float on your coffee. You want the sweet cream to be the consistency of yogurt or a thick smoothie.

To make layers in your drink, sweeten your coffee, then add your cream on top. When the sweet cream loses air over time, it will create a milky layer on top of your coffee! That’s the secret to all the pretty coffee and milk layers—sugar!

Food Science Break: The reason why sugar helps make layers in coffee is because it makes the liquid more dense. Dense liquids sink to the bottom, while less dense liquids float. That’s why when you pour sweet cream into sweet(er) coffee, it creates a layer!

Tips

Here are some tips for making your Oreo iced coffee with vanilla sweet cream:

• If you don’t have vanilla extract, you can use vanilla paste or even vanilla beans if you have them on hand. You can make it without vanilla, but I find that it brings out the Oreo’s cocoa flavor.
• You can use more Oreos if you want, but more Oreos means more little bits in your coffee.
• Instead of mixing the Oreo in your coffee, you can mix it in your sweet cream for an Oreo vanilla sweet cream. That way, your coffee stays clean, and all the Oreo flavor is mixed into the cream. But then again, they all blend into each other in the end.
• If you don’t have an ice machine, make your ice cubes beforehand! If you don’t want to dilute your coffee, make milk ice cubes instead or use reusable metal ice cubes.
• To eliminate Oreo fat pieces in your drink, omit the Oreo cream entirely. It makes your drink much smoother and doesn’t take away too much flavor, anyway.