Add the brown sugar, granulated sugar, water, cinnamon sticks, and salt to a small saucepan. Warm over medium heat, stirring until the sugar fully dissolves. Bring to a gentle simmer and cook for 3–5 minutes, just until the syrup smells strongly of cinnamon and looks slightly glossy. Remove from the heat, stir in the vanilla, and let the cinnamon sticks steep for another 5 minutes. Remove the cinnamon sticks and let the syrup cool. The syrup should be pourable, smooth, and warmly cinnamon-scented. Do not reduce it into a thick caramel. Thick syrup sinks and makes the drink uneven. Extending the steep for a further 5 minutes after the syrup is off the heat, rather than removing the cinnamon sticks immediately, gives their aromatic oils more time to fully infuse the liquid without any risk of over-reducing the syrup during that extra time.

Brew 120ml espresso total, equal to 4 standard 30ml shots. Let the espresso stand for 30–60 seconds if extremely hot, but do not let it go stale. The espresso should be fresh and aromatic. Cinnamon and brown sugar can cover a lot, but they cannot fix burnt or flat espresso. Even a drink built around a warm, forgiving spice profile still depends on genuine espresso quality underneath it — the cinnamon and brown sugar are meant to complement a properly brewed shot, not compensate for a flawed one.

Add 20ml cinnamon dolce syrup to each glass. Add a small splash of cold milk to each glass and stir to loosen the syrup. The syrup needs to be mixed into the milk base before the glass is fully built. If it stays at the bottom, the drink tastes weak at first and overly sweet at the end. Loosening the syrup while the glass is still simple and mostly empty is considerably more effective than attempting the same mixing once ice and the remaining milk have already filled the glass.

Fill each glass generously with ice. Pour 140ml cold whole milk into each glass. The glasses should look pale and creamy, with a light warm tint from the syrup. This is still a latte, so the milk should be the dominant body of the drink. Building on top of the already-loosened cinnamon base keeps that base's flavour distributed through the glass from the start, rather than sitting as a separate, concentrated layer beneath everything else.

Pour 60ml espresso into each glass over the milk and ice. Let the espresso swirl through the cinnamon milk, then stir briefly. The finished drink should settle into a pale caramel-beige colour with a warm cinnamon aroma. If it looks dark and coffee-heavy, there is not enough milk. If it tastes like cinnamon sugar milk, the espresso is too weak. This specific colour and taste checkpoint functions as a genuinely useful diagnostic — landing correctly between those two extremes confirms the milk, espresso, and syrup are all properly proportioned relative to one another.

For the more classic café-style version, add a small spoonful of lightly whipped cream on top of each drink. Mix a pinch of ground cinnamon with a pinch of granulated sugar and dust lightly over the cream. Serve immediately. Using a cinnamon-sugar mixture for this final dusting, rather than plain ground cinnamon alone, gives the dry topping a touch of sweetness and a slightly finer, more evenly distributing texture across the whipped cream's surface.