Starbucks Lavender Cold Foam Recipe

Starbucks' lavender cold foam is vanilla sweet cream, which is cream, milk and vanilla syrup, frothed with a lavender powder. At home a lavender syrup does the powder's job: froth a quarter cup of cold heavy cream with two tablespoons of milk and a tablespoon of lavender syrup for thirty seconds, until it pours thick. That is enough for two drinks.

How Starbucks makes lavender cold foam

The ingredient statement of the Iced Lavender Cream Matcha gives the foam in two parts. One is vanilla sweet cream: cream, milk and vanilla syrup. The other is a lavender powder made of sugar, salt, natural lavender flavour, colour from carrot and black currant juice concentrate, and soybean oil. The purple comes from the juice concentrates, not from the lavender.

Lavender is a spring flavour at Starbucks. In March 2026 it returned with the foam on the Iced Lavender Cream Matcha and on a new Iced Lavender Cream Chai. The recipe below is a reconstruction, and MakeFoodLovely is not connected with Starbucks.

Recipe

Starbucks Lavender Cold Foam

A reconstruction of Starbucks' lavender cream cold foam — cold heavy cream and milk frothed with lavender syrup and a little vanilla syrup. Enough for two drinks.

5.0 (2)Print

Prep

2 min

Total

2 min

Serves

2

Cuisine

American

Ingredients

• 1/4 cup heavy cream, cold
• 2 tablespoons 2% milk, cold
• 1 tablespoon lavender syrup
• 1 teaspoon vanilla syrup

Instructions

1. Pour the cream, milk, lavender syrup and vanilla syrup into a tall, narrow cup, all of it cold from the refrigerator.
2. Froth with a handheld milk frother for 20 to 30 seconds, moving it up and down, until the foam has thickened but still pours. Stop before it holds peaks.
3. Pour the foam slowly over the back of a spoon onto an iced drink, so that it floats.

Nutrition

Calories:

140

Calculated from the ingredient quantities above using the USDA FoodData Central database, then divided by the number of servings. It is an estimate and will vary with the exact products you use.

Lavender syrup from dried lavender

Simmer 1/2 cup of water with 1/2 cup of sugar until the sugar has dissolved. Take the pan off the heat, add 1 tablespoon of dried culinary lavender, cover and steep for 15 minutes, then strain. Longer steeping draws out bitterness. The syrup makes about 2/3 cup, enough for ten batches of foam, and keeps two weeks in the refrigerator.

Use lavender sold for cooking. The syrup comes out pale gold, not purple; a few drops of blueberry juice give it the colour. The lavender powder on this site is the other route to the same foam.

Foam that is too thin or too stiff

• It runs into the drink at once: the cream was not cold, or there was too much milk. Chill the cup and the cream and froth again.
• It sits on top in a lump: it was frothed too long and has turned into whipped cream. Stir in a teaspoon of milk.
• Syrup at the bottom of the cup: the syrup went in after frothing. It has to be in the cream before the frother starts.

Drinks for lavender cold foam

Starbucks pours it over iced matcha and iced chai. For the matcha at home, whisk 1 teaspoon of matcha with 2 tablespoons of hot water, pour it over ice with 3/4 cup of milk, sweeten with 2 teaspoons of syrup and add half the foam. The lavender matcha on this site covers that drink.

The same method with other flavours gives the cherry cold foam and the strawberry cold foam. For lavender to keep in the refrigerator and pour into hot coffee, see the lavender creamer.