The goal of this recipe is to make and then combine three things:
It is based on this recipe for root beer tiramisu by Mitchell Rohrbach, whose mother apparently lets him eat anything he wants for breakfast.
Marscapone filling
Put the cheese, brown sugar, and egg yolk into a bowl. Mix it up. Mix in the whipped cream. Mix in the egg white.
Shaved chocolate
Shave the chocolate with a grater or zester.
Soggy ladyfingers
Heat up the milk. Add the cocoa and mix well. Pour the hot cocoa into a shallow dish and put ladyfingers into it. Turn them over to make them all soggy, but not so soggy that they fall apart when you try to pick them up.
Assembly
As you soak the ladyfingers, you will also be assembling the tiramisu, because there's nowhere to store soggy ladyfingers except in the actual tiramisu dish. I used a 9-inch circular dish and arranged the ladyfingers like so:
(Note that this arrangement will leave you with 3 leftover ladyfingers. Either cram an extra ladyfinger in there per layer, or dispose of the remaining ladyfingers safely at a recycling center. Ladyfingers are not good for anything except being turned into tiramisu, or possibly being fried in cheese sauce and turned into giant Cheetos (I have not tried this, but it should work). Under no circumstances should you eat a raw ladyfinger. Keep out of reach of children.)
After arranging one layer of ladyfingers, apply the marscapone filling and shaved chocolate. Do two more layers. If you have leftover hot chocolate, dump it on top of the last layer of ladyfingers. Dust the top layer of marscapone with cocoa powder, because it looks cool. Chill for several hours. You now have tiramisu!
"You've ruined the tiramisu!", you might say, clutching your opera glasses to your chest. That may be true, but how come almost all of my tiramisu is gone, and your tiramisu still sits under plastic wrap in a display case next to the fruit salad, a lonely gold leaf adorning each forlorn square slice? Because my tiramisu tastes better, that's why! Also, you made the mistake of trying to sell your tiramisu in a restaurant for $4.50 a slice, while I was giving mine away.
Tiramisu is really just a trashy cake, like eclair cake (recipe for eclair cake, from Susanna, coming soon) which works by reappropriating some other, store-bought dessert (stipulating for the moment that ladyfingers can be considered a "dessert"). This fact is disguised by the fancy cheese, coffee and booze it contains. But once you look at tiramisu in this light, a wide range of variants become visible. For instance, if you wanted a specifically Rocky Mountain Mormon tiramisu rather than an ideologically-compatible Mormon tiramisu, you could use Nila wafers instead of ladyfingers, and, I don't know, cream cheese instead of marscapone.
There are all sorts of store-bought junk foods with which you could replace the lady fingers, and many of these foods have flavor. For instance, I used to like dipping those Nutter Butter peanut butter cookies into hot chocolate. Why not use them as the soak base in a peanut butter tiramisu? Or those big Pepperidge Farm cookies. Put Twinkies in there for a surefire rich-uncle-killer. Or, and this is where it becomes too crazy to even contemplate: instead of buying, bake chocolate chip cookies, then include those same cookies in a tiramisu. Your refrigerator will explode![0]
[0]With flavor.[1]
[1]I hope.
Mon Jul 21 2003 10:51 Mormon Tiramisu:
As regular NYCB readers will know, I like tiramisu. But, I don't really like coffee. And I could do without the gallons of booze that go into restaurant tiramisu. So on Saturday I made
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