This Cafe Turns Coffee Into a Real Work of Art

How do you like your coffee? Double strong? Extra foam? At a café in Taiwan’s Kaohsiung, you can have your latte with a flower, cat, or even an insect on top. All made out of foam, of course.

That’s because the owner of My Cofi, Chang Kuei-fang has turned coffee into real works of art according to Agencia EFE. She has become famous for her artistic renditions.

Latte art is a method of embellishing the foam that is poured on top of coffee. Most baristas create simple drawings of hearts, smiles, or flowers on top of the foam, but My Cofi has taken it to a whole new level.

So how does she do it? First, Chang starts with a cup of coffee and adds milk foam on top that she shapes with a spoon to form it to any image a customer shows her on their cell phone.  She carefully uses a thin metal utensil with espresso or chocolate to draw the image. Chang also uses strawberry jam to color parts of her creations.

It can take up to 15 minutes for Chang or one of her trained  baristas to create the masterpiece depending on how intricate it is, reported The Daily Mail.

But it comes with a pretty hefty price tag of around 250 Taiwan dollars – around $8.25 – for an easy shape like a dog or a fish to as much as $20 for a custom-made shape like the cockroach Chang created for a customer.

She began creating her special form of latte art around six years ago and has never said no to a customer’s request. Once she made a foam replica of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” but her most memorable creation was for a woman who wanted Chang to do a very special design.

The woman wanted to see her beloved cat that had passed away. “She was looking at me drawing over the counter, and when I presented the work to her, she suddenly cried,” Chang told The Daily Mail. “She was so touched to see the image of her cat.” 

My Cofi has become a popular tourist attraction and customers can be seen happily snapping photos of the latte masterpieces to put up on Facebook or Instagram.

If you can’t get to My Cofi in person, you can check them out on Facebook and  view photos of some of the creations and watch videos of Chang and her crew at work. Who knows, maybe a barista near you will start creating designer latte creations of his or her own.