How To Make A Rosetta

As soon as you have mastered the art of creating hearts in your lattes, you will want to move on to more difficult territory. The rosetta is a natural step in the progression as it will allow you to broaden your creative palette. Much truly great latte art starts as a rosetta-style design that evolves into something much more complex. So what is a rosetta, exactly? Well, it looks kind of like a fern in that it has long leaves at its base that get shorter towards the top. It's also kind of like a christmas tree except that the leaves are much more curvy.

Latte artists do all kinds of things with the rosetta. It can be used to accent another piece of latte art, or it can be incorporated into other designs like hearts, people, bunnies, and anything else you can think of. Sometimes the pour just creates its own designs for you, combining rosetta and heart into something truly fantastic. Once you know how to make a rosetta, the rest is up to your imagination.

The standard rules for all latte art apply when you make your rosetta. You need to make sure you steam the milk properly and that your espresso shots are coming out perfect. Some people even go through the trouble of warming up the coffee cup before filling it with espresso. Do not forget to swirl the milk using the steam wand at an angle to the steam pitcher to get a perfect velvety foam. The more high quality foam you use, the better your latte art is going to turn out.

You will begin the pour for a rosetta by tilting the coffee cup at a 45 degree angle. Throughout your pour, you will be slowly leveling the coffee cup until it is flat with the table at the end of the pour. This can be difficult to keep track, especially while you are wrapped up in being a coffee artiste, but it is absolutely essential. Throughout this tutorial, we will keep reminding and nagging you to do this.

Elevate the steam pitcher above the cup, bringing the pitcher down as you start to reach the less dense milk foam that will ultimately rest on top of your espresso. Once you feel you are about to pour this less dense foam, lower the pitcher near the cup and bring it to the far side. Don't move to the far side of the coffee cup by going any other way than through the middle of the cup. The line running through the middle of the cup is the stem of your rosetta. If there is any extra foam outside of it, whatever you have probably won't look like a rosetta.

When you reach the far side of the coffee cup, you will begin to use side-to-side wrist motions to build the wide base of your rosetta. As you do this, you will want to slowly bring the steam pitcher back towards you, which will be the near side of the coffee cup. Try to make each new wrist wiggle a little less wide so that the base of your rosetta narrows out to make a tree-like structure.

As soon as you reach the near side of the coffee cup, pour another straight line of foam right through the center of cup to the far side to finish your rosetta. The small force from making this extra line will make the leaves of the rosetta curve away from you, creating the impression of a leaf. Did you remember to slowly level out the coffee cup while you were doing all of these steps? If you didn't, you might not exactly have a rosetta shape.

By now, if there are any hearts or other shapes in your rosetta (which is cool too by the way), it probably happened because you stalled at some point in the process. We wouldn't expect you to get it perfect the first time. The ability to make a rosetta is essential to any budding latte artist. It opens many creative avenues and can be combined with other shapes to create something truly stunning. Keep trying and eventually you'll get the smoothness together enough to create that perfect shape.

Learn more about making Latte Art in our Latte Art How To!