The Best Snacks With Caffeine
Nothing beats a perfect latte, sipped between lazy bites of a flaky croissant at a dreamy, sunlit café. Unfortunately, that's far from reality for most of us, who end up burning our tongues while downing a quick cup on our way to work. But now, there's a whole new way to consume your caffeine: by eating it.
Edibles may call to mind a different substance, but nevertheless, a slew of products that want you to chew your coffee has hit the market recently, whether that be in cookie, truffle or energy bite form.
The most interesting? A high-end coffee bar (no, not the kind with a La Marzocco machine) called Il Morso, which combines coffee with sugar and cacao butter for a rich mouthfeel with a big kick. The founders come from the bean-to-bar chocolate world, and they're applying those methods to coffee, grinding the beans down and integrating them with cacao butter in flavors like Americano, mocha and coffee and cream. While a six-ounce cup of drip coffee packs about 100 milligrams of caffeine, and a 12-ounce can of soda has about 36 milligrams, one bar from Il Morso contains 18 milligrams.
Good & Delish Morning Rush coffee bites also combine coffee with sugar and fat in a solid bar. In contrast to Il Morso's, the bites taste sweeter and milkier, and have some extra ingredients (coffee liquor, dairy solids, confectionary emulsifier), with about 20 milligrams of caffeine.
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Then there are straight-up chocolate bars with caffeine like Awake Chocolate, which squeezes 101 milligrams of caffeine into a 230-calorie milk chocolate or caramel bar and can be found everywhere from Barnes & Noble to Shell gas stations.
Meanwhile, Ferrero's Pocket Coffee enrobes liquid espresso in smooth chocolate. Though that can make biting into one slightly dangerous, popping the whole thing into your mouth is a pretty enjoyable experience, and you'll get 22 milligrams of caffeine when you do.
Then there are novelty candies, like Java Pops, which come in Irish crème and French vanilla lollipop form with 50 milligrams a pop of the strong stuff, and caffeinated mints from Penguin with seven milligrams of the stimulant per piece.
But who can resist a cookie? The Cookie Department's Awaken Baked cookie packs 51 milligrams of caffeine into an espresso cookie with chocolate chips and sea salt. The company focuses on functional nutrition, so you'll find natural ingredients and an emphasis on nutrition and performance.
In other words, step away from the Red Bull: Energy just got a whole lot tastier.