Tiramisu, most certainly...

Have you ever said "NO" to tiramisu, come on if you have there is something wrong with and that I am certain of. It is one of the loveliest desserts and I simply cannot stop indulging when there is tiramisu around. Usually the tiramisus I encounter are from Trader Joe'e and sometimes at good Italian restaurants. The thought of making tiramisu from scratch never would have occurred because of the combination of delicate and gorgeous flavours. But then came along the gorgeous ladies, Aparna and Deeba to challenge us all with the TIRAMISU. One look at the recipe, I was aghast- "how do I it?", "it seems so complicated" and "mine will never taste like one" were my immediate reactions. I must say- I was worried unnecessarily.

The February 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Aparna of My Diverse Kitchen and Deeba of Passionate About Baking. They chose Tiramisu as the challenge for the month. Their challenge recipe is based on recipes from The Washington Post, Cordon Bleu at Home and Baking Obsession.


I will not elaborate on the steps here, you can check "the daring kitchen", I will however talk about the changes I made to the various layers and some problems I ran into.

Mascarpone cheese: yay!! My first homemade cheese and it turned out okay, I think. Just okay because I did not understand when the recipe it said "it will not get clumpy, it will only coat the back of the spoon"- well I was not sure about anything I did, so towards the end I added about 1/4 tsp tartaric acid and it did seem to clump up a bit with that. Then I realized that I should have just let it cool once it was done heating. Also I used ultra pasteurized cream (am not sure if that would have made the difference). 
I ended up with a slightly runnier version of the cheese, but we ate it and we are still ALIVE!


Ladyfinger biscuits: they turned out just fine (I did not modify anything here), in fact it was hard not to eat them, by themselves, right away! I soaked my biscuits in brewed strong coffee with about 1 tsp of almond extract


Pastry cream: I used an eggless recipe from Aparna's My diverse Kitchen. Turned out to be heavenly, I could not stop liking the spoon. 


Eggless custard: I used the same recipe as I did before in my last post- the inspiration of that recipe comes from the lovely blog here.


The actual preparation needs to be done in advance as the cream layers need to be chilled but the assembly process does not take any time. Assemble the tiramisu and unlike me, be patient and let it set before you take a picture!


Judgement: YUMMY!!
Will definitely make it again and hopefully this time I will stick to the traditional layers of zabaglione and pastry cream.