Easy and Delicious Tiramisu

 My mother in law just loves coffee so each year for her birthday we try to think of a dessert that uses a bit of coffee.  I had mentioned Tiramisu has a coffee flavor and Alec immediately jumped on the idea.  Turns out his girlfriend has been talking a lot about this particular dessert and since Alec had never even tasted it before (or seen it!) he thought it would be fun to tackle.

What made our version so easy was buying pre-made ladyfingers from our grocery store.  We were making this dessert while in the middle of a power outage and our generator is not strong enough to use our oven.  We also thought for our first time making the dessert it would be easiest to just focus on the other layers.

 It turned out great!  The whole family-- even my two coffee HATERS thought this was a delicious dessert and asked if we could make it again.

Ingredients:
For the ladyfinger layer:
6 ounces or so of pre-made ladyfingers (we found ours in our grocery store bakery)
6 ounces brewed coffee (we used decaf)
For the custard layer:
6 large egg yolks
3/4 cup sugar (for baking into the eggs)
2/3 cup whole milk
16 ounces mascarpone cheese (found near the fresh mozzarella near the deli)
ANOTHER scant 1/3 cup sugar for mixing in with the marscapone cheese
For the whipped cream layer: 
1 pint heavy cream
4 tablespoons powdered sugar
1 tsp. vanilla extract
Additional ingredients:
A couple of Tablespoons cocoa powder for dusting
Chocolate shavings or pieces for garnish (optional)
Hot fudge for drizzling (optional)

He actually began making the custard layer first by putting all 6 egg yolks into a medium sized sauce pan and whisking in the sugar.  After whisking in the milk, he turned the burner on medium and kept stirring constantly until the mixture to came to a low boil.  We left it at a low boil for 3 or so minutes until we could see the mixture thicken slightly.  Then we set it aside to cool for 10 minutes; checking to make sure we had a pudding like consistency when it was cooled. We covered the pan with plastic wrap and put it in the fridge to make sure it was completely cooled.

While that was cooling off he made the instant coffee and lined an 8x8 pan with the lady fingers.  The ones from our store were cut in half and we only used one of the halves since our dish wasn't super deep and we knew we wanted to full layers of each of the layers.  Once we had the lady finger laid out he drizzled some coffee on each lady finger using a spoon; we wanted them coffee soaked but not completely saturated.

Once the egg mixture was nice and cool we used the stand mixer to whip in the marscapone cheese and after tasting how bland the mixture was we decided to mix in an approximate 1/3 cup of sugar  (I wasn't great about making sure the measuring cup was full!).  Sorry it's not an exact measurement but at that point I was trying to salvage what was turning out to be a pretty tasteless dessert.

We gently spread 1/2 the sweetened custard over our ladyfingers taking care not to pull them up with the back of the spoon.  I found small dollops here and there then smoothing them out worked best.

With our custard all set we turned to making whipped cream. The recipe we were following didn't call for any sugar in this either but we didn't agree!  We should have mixed in the powdered sugar with the cream and vanilla right away but since we already had whipped the cream and then didn't like the taste our whipped cream began to curdle just a bit; thankfully the taste was perfect and the texture was unnoticeable in the dessert.  I bet you could substitute Cool Whip for this layer and it would work just fine if you wanted one less step.

We put 1/2 the whipped cream on top and sprinkled a bit of cocoa on top.

We repeated each of the layers and we did not use all the coffee.  Once we thought each ladyfinger was sufficiently moistened we poured the rest down the drain.

As you can see the second layer of cocoa was much thicker!

We set the tiramisu in the fridge around lunchtime and planned to serve it after dinner the next night. I was hoping our ladyfingers would hold up to all that soaking time and honestly? I think it was perfect!  The flavors melded so beautifully and I had no problems dishing up each serving.  But first we topped our tiramisu with a bit of hot fudge sauce and some chopped chocolate morsels.

Just look at each of those luscious, creamy layers!

We can not wait to make it again!

Have you ever tried making tiramisu?

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