Italy: Tiramisu

Tiramisu is one of the quickest classical desserts to prepare. For this sponge cake we have to book half an hour only and then long time for cooling. Probably, Tiramisu comes from Italian Treviso city. The original recipe can be found here. I also used my bible of desserts to prepare this delicious cake. Taking couple of simple rules into account can turn Tiramisu dessert into a piece of cake.

Polish version

Rules:

1.     Ladyfingers dipping: Ladyfingers should be soaked up in COLD coffee only for a few seconds.
2.     Do not add any milk to the cream- it has to be dense and tight for easy handling with finished cake. Remember that when you put wet ladyfingers with cream together it will lose its density a little bit.
3.     Take time to cool it down deeply. It would be good to prepare it one day before serving
4.     Serving way: Flavor top of the cake with powder cocoa just before serving the dessert. You can use a small kitchen sieve
5.     For the beginners: If you don’t add any thickeners as gelatin (I don’t), it’s hard to take the cake off from the form and cut it. Thus use single glass desserts bowls to serve it separately for everyone. Nice and easy.
6.     The original recipe says nothing about adding an alcohol to coffee. But it is also known to add famous Amaretto the almond-flavored liqueur. You can also use different cognac-like liquors instead. 

Ingredients for 5-6 pieces:

·                     4 eggs (yolks and whites separately)

·                     500g mascarpone cheese

·                     250-300ml of strong coffee

·                     3/4 glass of sugar (can be less) 

·                     50-100ml Amaretto liqueur

·                     ca 30 big ladyfingers

·                     2 table spoons of cocoa powder

Mix the yolks with sugar to create light color cream.  Wisk the whites to a firm foam (in the original recipe whites are not used, but I wanted to utilize all ingredients I had). Here comes mascarpone cheese, add it to the rest of cream and mix it. Then add carefully the whites foam with wooden spoon. 

Mix it to receive uniform cream.

Ladyfingers:

Make a coffee and pour it into the bowl to facilitate dipping our ladyfingers. When the coffee is cold, add the alcohol. Put a ladyfinger into coffee for one second and then place it in the cooking mould on by one

Put a layer of ladyfingers and the distribute the cream evenly. Again, put the second layer of biscuits and cream. On the whole top of the cake powder the cocoa. Using the sieve.  

Enjoy!