Coffee Musings

The Pacific North­w­est is meant to be an area full of cof­fee bars and people addicted to the bean, but in Van­couver it’s not the num­ber one addic­tion by any means, at least judging by the num­ber of estab­lish­ments you see. It’s far easi­er to find sushi than cof­fee! Some anec­dot­al evid­ence — we took our son to a birth­day party in Coquit­lam (one of the sub­urbs in Great­er Van­couver) and after drop­ping him off at the party, I decided I wanted some cof­fee. Driv­ing around the streets in search of a café we noticed every strip mall had a sushi bar (some of dubi­ous qual­ity), but we had to drive to a large mall to find a cof­fee bar. I had­n’t thought to look up cof­fee bars in Delo­c­at­or first, so we ended up with Star­bucks, but at least it was coffee.

And some­thing I only dis­covered last week which will be of interest to lan­guage ped­ants — in North Amer­ica, cof­fee cake is a type of cake with crumble or streusel on top that is served with cof­fee. Where I grew up (New Zea­l­and) and lived (Aus­tralia) and, I assume, in many oth­er parts of the Eng­lish-speak­ing world, a cof­fee cake is a cake that has cof­fee as one of its main ingredi­ents. I have a recipe book from Great Bri­tain with a recipe for cof­fee car­rot cake, for example, which has cof­fee in it, and no streusel on top. I guess I don’t eat cake very often since it took 10 years to dis­cov­er this discrepancy…